That's Why My Hand Was Shaking
by Teenage.Anomaly
Summary: Things are changing all over the island and we're quickly learning that not all changes are for the better. Smoke and mirrors and guns and an ancient mystery.. Sequel to All Roads Lead Here. Season Two. Sayid/OC/Sawyer, Sawyer/Kate/Jack, Richard, Ben.
1. A Forgotten Age

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly**

**Summary: (sequel to _All Roads Lead Here_) Katty was just beginning to adjust to life on the island when she's hit upside the head by the news a man she thought was dead is alive and kicking. With that knowledge eating at her, she has to continue to pretend that everything is normal, as she's hit with blow after blow. New friendships, new relationships are being formed, but it feels like everything is falling down around her and as all she can do is watch from the sidelines. And, with 'Henry Gale' thrown into the mix along with the Taillies and the weight of the world on the shoulders of a teenage girl, how long can she last before reaching her breaking point? Sayid/OC/Sawyer, Sayid/Shannon, Sawyer/Kate/Jack, Charlie/Claire/Locke (yes, you read right:)) Libby/Hurley. OC, Sayid, Sawyer, Locke, Jack, Kate, Ana Lucia, Hurley, Benry, and Richard centric.**

**Rating: T for violence, language, and sexual content. WARNING: This story will feature much more sexual content (not the deed itself, I could write that without giggling the entire time) than the previous installment. Nothing graphic, but there's going to be much more references, innuedo, etc. This story is going to be much darker than the previous one as well- don't worry, it won't be depressing and there will still be heaps of humor, but the themes are going to be much more mature and much darker. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own LOST, any of the characters, or the songs/quotes featured at the beginnings of each chapter. I own Katty, Elliot, any characters and the plot that are not connected to the show. Additional disclaimers will be given as needed, but for the most part THIS IS THE DISCLAIMER FOR ALL FOLLOWING CHAPTERS.

* * *

**_Electric blue eyes, where did you come from  
Electric blue eyes, who sent you  
Electric blue eyes, always be near me  
Electric blue eyes, I need you_

If you should go, you should know I love you  
If you should go, you should know Im here  
Always be near me, guardian angel  
Always be near me, there's no fear

**Chapter One: A Forgotten Age **

_There are some doors that should never be opened- Anonymous_

**November 24, 1992. Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA. Roughly ten in the morning.**

To say that Elliot Alpert was unhappy would be an extreme understatement. He'd been pulled from his home early in the morning two days ago and sent to a little town in Mississippi, to a hospital, where a completely unremarkable baby girl had just been born to two completely unremarkable new parents.

Elliot had passed Ted and Karen Sherman on his way to the nursery. Both of them were beaming with pride and joy and disbelief, their young faces grinning widely. Ted had an arm around his wife's shoulders, and neither of them had any eyes for Elliot, which was just as well to the immortal.

He stood in front of the plane of glass, staring down at the squalling baby girl. Her tiny little hands were balled into fists that she waved and jerked through the air, unsure what to do with them. Her eyes were screwed shut and her toothless mouth was open wide in a loud, tinny infant cry.

Elliot saw no reason to be here. There was nothing special about this little girl, nothing at all.

But he'd always had a soft spot for children, and he couldn't help a small smile that formed on his face.

Almost as though she sensed his sudden contentment, the infant stopped her screaming. She blinked, once, then twice, her big, wide and surprisingly intelligent eyes fixing him in her gaze. Her eyes were so deeply, so violently blue, they appeared to be pieces of twilight trapped in a little, golden face.

She peered up at him, the frown falling off of her fat little face, her mouth open slightly as she gazed up at him. There was such an animal intelligence in her gaze that Elliot's brow furrowed. She blinked again and tilted her head to the side, just a little.

Without thinking, he slowly raised his hand and placed it on the cool plane of glass that separated himself and the infant.

She just blinked up at him again.

"Hello, Kathryn," he murmured.

-

**November 5****th****, 2009. Present Day.**

It was like déjà vu, almost. The girl simply stood there, wide eyed and drop jawed, staring up at him in utter disbelief.

"Hello, Kathryn," he said, and his voice seemed to have some effect on her. She still said nothing, and the shock on her face told him it might be a while before she said anything.

"Look, I realize this might be a lot to take in-"

"You're… alive."

Her voice was just like he remembered, sharp and a little bit raspy, with just the slightest twang of a Southern accent.

"It's possible," he said, smiling a little. "I can't die."

"You're_ alive_," she said again, her eyes widening even more, pointing a shaking finger at him. The orange light from behind her illuminated her silhouette, and her blue eyes shone like a fire in the night.

"Listen, Katty, we don't have time for this."

"Don't have time?" she said, and her voice was high and nearly hysterical. She threw her hand to her side, shaking her head, her mouth open, her eyes still wide and disbelieving. "You were _dead_!"

"Please," he said, raising his hands and stepping forward, "please keep your voice down."

"How is this possible?"

"I can't die," he said insistently, raising his eyes brows, but she shook her head.

"I was _covered_ in your blood," she said, her voice shaking. "I saw the light leave your eyes, so don't _tell_ me you can't die!" she hissed, her eyes flashing.

"Look, I'll explain everything later, but right now you have to-"

"Katty!" Jack's worried voice called from the clearing surrounding the hatch. "Katty, where are you?"

"I- I'm okay, Jack!" she called, her voice steadier. "I just wanted to get some air!"

"We're going back to the caves."

"I'll be there in a minute."

She turned an infuriated, disbelieving and hurt gaze back to Elliot. With a sigh, he lifted up his green t-shirt, revealing three circular shaped scars on his chest. She stared at them before her eyes flicked back up to his face, her brow furrowing.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know how to tell you, once you got here-"

"I killed for you," she said through gritted teeth.

"Katty!"

"Coming!"

She looked to Elliot. "I have to go."

"Katty, please-" he stepped forward and grabbed her arm, but she jerked out of his grasp.

"Don't," she said warningly, her eyes wide and angry, before turning on her heel and walking away. Elliot stood in the jungle, staring after her.

The last time he'd seen her, those eyes had been wide with fright, not anger. She'd been paler, her hair had been darker, and she hadn't had that scar on her right cheek. She'd become scrawnier since Venice, and she carried herself differently.

Elliot had watched her grow up, and now he realized that she had grown up a long time ago, without his either his knowledge or consent.

**March 3, 1995**

It was a cloudy day, windy and cool. Elliot sat on a bench and watched the little girl play inside the play ground from behind the newspaper he was paying absolutely no attention to.

She was an enchanting little girl, two years old, tiny and cheerful as she tottered around the mulch-covered playground. Her mother followed her around, exhausted, holding her newborn boy to her chest as she chased the vivacious young girl. Elliot grinned as he watched the kid.

She turned to him, a grin lifting her round cheeks, her eyes flashing as her high laughter carried across the park.

**Present Day**

I followed behind the group, my mind whirling furiously.

Elliot was alive. The man who'd turned me into what I was, the man who I'd seen die, the man I'd killed for- he was alive. He had been, he'd been on this island the entire time, and he hadn't told me.

Richard hadn't told me, either. He could have, anytime we'd seen each other, it would have been so easy for him to tell me his brother was alive- but he hadn't. He'd let me go on wishing and regretting.

"You okay, dude?" asked Hurley. I glanced up into his torch-illuminated face.

"I'm fine," I said, my voice still hard. He blinked at me.

"You sure? You look like you've seen a ghost, or something."

I laughed, the sound ironic and humorless. In a way, I had seen a ghost.

"So, did you see the door?"

"What door?"

"The hatch door. The one that said 'quarantine'."

"Yeah, I saw it."

"What do you think?" he asked, staring at me. I shrugged, not really in the mood to converse or share theories.

"I don't know. Maybe the people inside it thought they needed to be quarantined from what was out here."

"You mean, like… us?"

I looked at him. "Yeah, Hurley. Like us."

Hurley walked with me in silence for a few more minutes, but as he slowly realized I wanted to be left alone, he sped up to walk with Jack, and after a few minutes, I heard them talking quietly.

Elliot was alive.

Richard had- well, not lied to me exactly, but he hadn't told me the truth. It felt like he'd betrayed me, and that made me angrier than I'd expected.

I gritted my teeth as I thought of Venice, of Elliot, of blood covering my body.

"_You ain't a baby no more."_

However, there was some comfort in the fact that I had now officially survived a season of LOST. I still thought of life as seasons- it was weird. I was in season two. How in the hell would I survive this? I wondered, briefly, whether I'd be taken with Sawyer and Kate and Jack. Instinct told me yes, yes I would. But then logic kicked in and said that there was nothing remotely interesting about me; why would they take me?

I hoped they would.

For the first time in several hours, a grin spread over my face as I stared at Hurley's and Jack's backs.

I was going to meet Benry freaking Linus this season.

We reached the caves and were immediately surrounded by people questioning us, wanting to know what was going on.

"Is everyone okay?" asked a shaken looking Claire, holding Aaron very tightly. I nodded, reaching out to rub the baby's fuzzy little head.

"Yeah," I said. "We're all alright."

"Katty." I turned around to see Locke standing behind me, his lined, craggy face determined in the orange light.

"Are you coming?" he asked, and I nodded.

"Of course."

He smiled, just for a moment, before the determined, focused look came back to his face. "Come help me with the cable."

We wormed our way through the crowd, ignoring Jack as he began to speak, to comfort everyone, like he was Moses. I was proud of Jack, and fond of him, but right now, I was in full Team Locke mode.

"Here," said Locke, handing me a loop of cable. I wrapped it over my shoulders and around my waist, which was the only way I could transport it without it dragging on the ground, me being as short as I was. I held my flashlight in between my teeth and re-arranged my gun.

"John, what are you doing?" asked Jack suddenly, and I straightened up, turning to look at him. His grey eyes, lined and exhausted in the firelight, fixed on us, angry, surprised and, when they settled on me, a little betrayed.

"We're getting some cable," said John, calmly. Jack glanced at me.

"What for?" he asked, knowing perfectly well what for.

"It's for the hatch," said John, not apologetic at all. "We're going in."

"Do you really think that's the smartest thing to do right now, John?" asked Jack sarcastically, and John shook his head, shrugging. I watched the two of them, saying nothing. All of the eyes in the camp were on the three of us.

"I doubt it," said Locke exasperatedly. "In fact, you're right. The safest thing is to stay here, wait for morning- wait for these Others, to see if they ever show up- wait for the brave folks on the raft to bring help." He hesitated, his eyes boring into Jack as everyone watched him. "But me, I'm tired of waiting. C'mon," he said to me and, with one last glance at a helpless Jack, I followed him into the dark jungle.

It wasn't a long walk from the caves to the hatch, maybe twenty minutes, but I'd been walking all day and it was almost midnight and dammit, I was exhausted. I stumbled a little, trying to keep up with John. He glanced back at me.

"You alright?" he asked. I sighed, wiping sweat off my forehead with the hand that wasn't holding a torch.

"Yeah," I said. "Just tired."

"You don't have to come, you know-"

"I kinda do, John," I said quietly, and after a moment, he smiled.

Truth be told, finding out about Elliot had exhausted me more than the hiking. I'd been on the island forty-six (almost forty-seven) days now, and my stamina was much better than it used to be.

But there was absolutely nothing that could have prepared me for seeing Elliot again. My heart was still pounding and my limbs were shaky.

We reached the caves in fairly good time and he began setting up the cables to lower me down. Once it was all ready to go, he helped me step into the make-shift harness. I adjusted it around my hips before looking up at him.

"Kate's coming," I said. "Wait for her. I'll be alright."

He nodded. "Sure thing."

I too a deep breath, moving over to the edge of the hole in the hatch.

"You ready?" he asked, his eyes wide. I nodded.

"Okay," he said. I felt down in the hold with my leg, searching for the first rung of the broken ladder. After finding it, and lowering myself in, I nodded at John.

I stepped off the last rung of the ladder and the harness tightened around my hips as John began lowering my down the hole. After a few seconds of vertigo from the sensation of being suspended over a bottomless pit, I was careful to make no noise, even breathing quietly, to avoid alerting Desmond.

I reached the bottom and stumbled against the floor, the water splashing quietly as I climbed clumsily out of the harness and tugged it a few times. Once it began disappearing back up, I moved into the hatch.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. It wasn't unpleasant, but it smelled old and somewhat metallic. I walked quietly down the halls of the hatch, passing the graffitied wall and the wall that lifted my cross up in the air. Ignoring the tingling in my stomach, I kept moving, finally entering the kitchen before-

"Don't take another step."

The accented voice sounded from several feet behind me and I froze.

"I'm not here to hurt you-" I said loudly, and I heard him take a step towards me.

"Shut up and turn around. Put yer hands in the air."

I did so, turned slowly, and the crazed-looking Scotsman came into view. His eyes widened when he saw me and he lowered the gun a fraction, genuine surprise in his eyes.

"You- you're a girl," he said, his voice shocked. I raised my eyebrows.

"And you're a master of observation."

He too another step towards me and I fought the urge to step backwards. I knew it wasn't me, or my captivating beauty (or lack thereof) that was intoxicating to him, but the sheer fact that I was female and bore a passing resemblance to Penny (I had blonde hair and blue eyes, anyway), and that he hadn't seen a girl for three years. Hell, he'd probably be coming onto Rose if she was the first one he saw.

He reached up, hands trembling, to feel my face. I didn't move, just looked at him as his hands moved over my face, his eyes flicking from my mouth to my nose and finally to my eyes.

"You're- you're real, then," he said quietly.

"I hope so."

"Who are you?" he asked, finally stepping away from me. My breathing eased.

"My name's Katty Sherman-"

We both heard voices, and suddenly his gun was raised again, the sleeves of his jumpsuit stressed back to reveal sexy hands and forearms.

I wasn't interested in Desmond, but a girl would have to be blind to not find him ridiculously good looking. Too bad I preferred my men immortal, Arabic, or blonde.

"Stay right here, Katty Sherman. Who's your friend?" he jerked his head in the direction I'd come from.

"That'd be Kate," I said, and a look of disbelief crossed his face.

"Another girl?"

"Most of the guys on the island seem to think so, yeah."

"Wait, there are- there are more of you?"

"Look, Des, I'd love to explain all of this, but you need to go deal with Kate, now."

Instantly, his gun was trained on me. Shit.

"How the bloody hell do you know my name?"

"Deal with Kate!" I said exasperatedly. "I'll explain everything, I swear."

"Do not move," he said warningly, before disappearing around the corner. I waiting, listening intently and examining the hatch. There was a flash of bright light, a scream, and then black. I heard John shouting Kate's name and simply waited, glancing at the bunk beds in the next room. They looked extremely inviting and it had been over a month since I'd slept in an actual bed…

Desmond strode back into view, carrying an unconscious Kate. He dumped her unceremoniously on the floor, the rifle clicking as he pulled it into place. He glared at me.

"Who is she?" he growled.

"Kate," I said. "I already told you."

"I know what you told me. And who's the other man, the man that was up there, lowering you two down here?" His eyes were half crazed, his hair messy and going everywhere.

"That's John Locke," I said, hoping that my voice was calming. It didn't, however, seem to have that effect on Desmond.

"John Locke, aye? An' who the hell is that?"

"He's not gonna hurt you-"

Sounds came at us from the hallway leading to the shaft, and Desmond turned the gun on me. My heart skipped a beat.

"Get on the ground," he hissed. "Now!"

I nodded quickly and lowered myself to the cold metal floor of the hatch, my heart pounding and my worn muscles trembling. Kate was beginning to stir, her face twisting into a grimace.

"Kate?" I whispered, shaking her shoulder gingerly.

"Don't talk!" came Desmond's voice from farther away. Kate moaned and I heard John's steady footsteps.

"Kate, Katty," John breathed, putting a hand on each of our backs' as he crouched down next to us. Kate moaned, turning her head. I looked up at John.

"We're okay," I said.

"John," moaned Kate. I stared at her and so did John, his eyes widening.

"Easy, easy," he said as she began to try to sit up.

"Oh, John," she murmured.

There was the familiar click of a rifle cocking and John turned around to see a very angry, defensive, and confused Desmond staring down at him.

"Are you him?" he asked. "Are you him?"

John looked at me and I said nothing, still half-lying on the cold hatch floor, just widened my eyes as my brow furrowed.

"Yes," said Locke finally, looking from me to Desmond. "Yes I am."

For the first time since I'd seen him, a smile that wasn't insane spread over Desmond's face, tentative and relieved. "I can't believe it," he said. "You're finally here."

"Well, here I am," said Locke, smiling. For the first time, something in Desmond's face hardened and he gestured to Kate and I with his gun.

"Who are they?" he asked, his voice hard. John looked at the two of us and then back to Desmond, still smiling, and said, "They're with me."

And with that, the _almost_ happy expression melted right off Desmond's face.

"What did one snowman say to the other snowman?" he snarled. John's brow furrowed, confused.

"I don't know what you're talking about-"

"Get rid of the knife," growled Desmond, his eyes flashing. "You're not him."

Locke dropped the knife on the floor with a quiet clatter and then raised his hands in the air, his face open and honest.

"We didn't come here to hurt you-"

"Yeah, then why did you come?" snapped Desmond. I said nothing.

"We were in a plane crash," said Kate quietly, and Desmond's eyes flicked to her.

"Were you now?" he said sarcastically, cocking his head slightly. "And when was that?"

"Forty-four, uh, forty-six days ago," said Locke, looking at me. I nodded, and Desmond turned to me.

"Forty-six days?" snarled Desmond. "Move."

He gestured with the rifle for us to stand and we did so, the other two gracefully, but I had to grab John's arm to pull myself to my unsteady feet. I was exhausted and sore and I had seen a man I thought was dead maybe three hours ago. My mind and body were spent. Desmond seemed to notice, too, as his eyes flicked over my face in the gloomy, bluish light, and I could see the wheels turning in his mind.

"How long have you been down here?" asked John, grasping my arm to steady me as the room swam in front of me. I blinked several times.

"Shut it," snapped the angry Scotsman. He grabbed a length of rope and tossed it at us, and Kate's hand wrapped around it. She stared at Desmond, wide-eyed.

"Tie him up," said Desmond, jerking the gun at Locke. He and I exchanged a glance, his eyes asking me a question. I nodded.

"Do it!" shouted Desmond. Kate gave John an apologetic look and moved to him, but John turned to Desmond, raising his hands.

"Wait. Wait, wait- you're tying up the wrong person."

"How's that, brother?"

"It's pointless to tie me up, I'm not dangerous," he said, raising his eyebrows, his voice mild but with an undertone of urgency as he pointed at Kate. She gave him a disbelieving, angry stare. "But her, she's a fugitive."

"And what about her?" asked Desmond, jerking the gun in my direction. John looked down at me, his eyes thoughtful.

"She's just- she's just a teenager," he said, waving a wand carelessly. "She's no threat to anyone."

"She's not, aye?"

"No," said John, not meeting my eyes as he lied through his teeth. We all knew that, in more than one way, I was the most dangerous person in the hatch.

What an oddly invigorating thought that was.

"She's no threat to anyone," finished Locke.

"So, what does that make you then, brother?"

Locke hesitated, glancing at Kate and I. "I'm a regional collections manager for a cardboard manufacturer - boxes primarily."

"All right then, box man, teeny bopper-tie her up."

Locke reached for Kate and I looked at her apologetically.

"Sorry, Kate-"

"Don't you dare touch me," snarled Kate, jerking away from Locke and glaring at me.

"Hey! You be a good girl, right?"

With a final angry glare at Locke, she allowed us to turned her around and Locke began tying her wrists, more gently than he would to someone else.

"What do you think you're doing?" hissed Kate, glancing at us over her shoulder. I blinked. Everything was beginning to loose focus.

"I'm doing what's best for all of us," said John quietly.

He reached around her and slid a knife down the front of her jeans. My incoherent mind was forming conclusions that absolutely weren't there. Let's just put it this way: if I'd been sitting at home, on my couch, watching this scene, I'd have a new ship. I HAD seen this on a TV before, but there was something oddly sexual about the entire exchange now that I was smack in the middle of it.

"Alright, bring her here," said Desmond and Locke turned Kate around, his hands on her arms, keeping her angled away from Desmond as he maneuvered her to the storage closet.

"Oh, hey, John, wait, hey. Wait!"

Ignoring her shouts, John pushed her into the storage room and shut the door before turning back to Desmond and I, his face impassive.

Locke and Desmond began discussing the crash and I, on the brink of unconsciousness, collapsed into the couch, fighting to keep my eyelids open. It was almost four in the morning.

I drifted for maybe five minutes before being jolted abruptly into awareness by that damned beeping. I sat up straight with a gasp, eyes wide, staring around the hatch. Desmond and Locke looked at me oddly.

"Are you alright?" asked John.

"Dandy," I said.

"Stay right there," said Desmond threateningly as he rose to his feet. I sank back into the chair.

"Dude, I'm not going anywhere," I said, raising my eyebrows. He smirked at me.

"Good. Alright, box man, get up…"

The moved into the computer room and I watched them blearily for a few minutes, listening to them. I had no energy and the temptation to crawl into those beds was almost over-whelming.

I only remember flashes, after that.

Desmond and Locke talking about Jack.

Jack.

He came over to me, his eyes widening, and grasped my face, turning my head, slapping me lightly.

"Katty," he said, his voice panicked. "Katty, are you okay?"

" 'M just sleepin', Jack," I muttered and he gave a relieved chuckle.

"Where's Kate and Locke?"

I flapped a hand wearily at the computer room and Jack rose to his feet and made his way over there.

"I wouldn't do that, Jack."

I opened my eyes. Locke was standing outside the computer room, with Desmond behind him, the rifle pointed at his head. I saw Jack's face contort and, mustering all my nonexistent energy, rose to my feet.

"Where's Kate? What the hell did you-"

I swaggered over to Desmond and stood next to Locke. Desmond glared at me, saying, "Move and I kill him. Put the gun down."

"Where's Kate?" shouted Jack, not putting the gun down.

"Jack, you really should put the gun down," I slurred, although I myself had a gun stuck down the front of my jeans.

"Jack, it's okay."

"I said drop it," growled Desmond. Jack's eyes tightened and his finger twitched on the trigger.

"Where's Kate?" shouted Jack, moving forward.

"Jack-"

"She's fine. Just put down the-"

"I'm not putting down anything," grinned Jack, his face white and a little insane.

I watched Desmond's face contort as he jerked the gun up at fired at shot at the vent. It clanged loudly and I winced.

"Do you want him to die?" shouted Desmond. "Put it down."

"Is this what you were talking about, Locke?" asked Jack sarcastically, the same angry smile on his face. "Is this your destiny? 'All roads lead here'?"

"Every road did lead here, Jack," I said, surprising myself. "You don't… you've got no idea…"

"Jack, calm down," said John, his voice calm and supremely unworried, as though there wasn't a half crazed Scottish guy holding a gun to his head.

Desmond moved so that he was looking at Jack over Locke's shoulder. "Lower your gun or I'll blow his damned head off, brother."

Jack's face twisted in surprise and disbelief and I looked between the two of them.

"You."

At that moment there was a sudden flurry of action. Kate sneaked up behind Desmond and whacked him in the back of the head with a gun, which caused several things to happen. I screamed out of pure shock and twisted around, trying to figure out what the hell was going on as Desmond's gun went off, sending Jack and John ducking.

"- the hell?" I shouted once it was all over, still hunched over with my arms over my head.

There were electrical cracklings coming from inside the computer room and the smell of burnt metal stung at my nose as acrid smoke rose from the now slightly crumpled computer.

Jack leapt over to Desmond and crouched down on top of him, holding him down. "Do not move."

"Now, don't-" said Locke cautiously. Kate gave him an incredulous look and Jack just glared at him, still pinning Desmond down.

"Don't what?" spat Jack angrily.

"He's unarmed."

"He just had a gun pointed at your head!" shouted Jack, gesturing at the fallen Scot.

"He wasn't gonna do anythin'," I said exasperatedly.

"How do you know that?" shouted Jack. I just looked at him pointedly. From underneath Jack Desmond's eyes widened, his face draining of color. I looked up into the computer room. Smoke was pouring off of the computer.

"Well, that sucks," I said.

"Oh, what did you do?" moaned Desmond quietly, staring at the computer with a broken, hopeless look. "What did you do? We're all going to die. We're all going to die."

Jack looked at me. "What the hell does he mean?"

"He means," I said, enunciating very clearly, "that if he doesn't fix that computer and enter the code, then every single person on this island will die."

There was a very loud silence as the computer crackled and hissed and every eye turned to me, Jack's disbelieving, Kate's scared, Locke's hard and thoughtful, and Desmond's shocked.

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Move it, Jack, I said, shouldering the doctor out of the way. I grasped Desmond's hand and pulled him to his feet.

"Same way I know yer name, Des, and who you were 'fore you came to the island."

He just stared at me and then asked, "Who are you?"

"I'll get back to you with that."

We turned to walk into the hatch room, but Jack's gun was raised and I wasn't sure who it was pointed at.

"What," he said, breathing heavily, "what the hell is going on?"

"I have to fix it," said Desmond, turning back to him

"Katty, what the hell is he talking about?"

"Dude, I just explained this."

"Listen, if you do not let me go, we are going to die-" said Desmond clearly, raising his hands in a placating motion.

"Stop moving or I swear to god-!"

"Look at the wall!" shouted Desmond, pointing a quivering finger at the clock on the wall. "You see that? That's a timer and it's counting down. I've got to enter the code. I've got to push the button!"

There was a moment of silence and then Jack said, the threat plain in his voice, "Or what?"

Desmond said nothing, but exchanged a look with me.

"Jack, you should let him go," said Locke, his voice cautious.

"Don't tell me what to do!" shouted Jack before turning back to Desmond. "Or what? What's going to happen?"

Desmond's brow furrowed and he stared at Jack, his eyes very thoughtful. "Do I know you?"

Jack grimaced.

"You got him?" he asked Kate. She nodded, pointing the gun at him.

"Go," Jack said, and Desmond ran into the computer room, me following him. He stood in front of the computer, his face bone white, his eyes wide and terrified.

"Bastard," he murmured, his voice horrified. "Hey, you, girl-"

"Katty."

"Katty." He looked up at me, his eyebrows pulling up in the middle.

"Do you know anything about technology?"

"Not a damn thing."

All traces of hope left his face. He ran out of the computer room and began rummaging through the bookshelves, throwing books everywhere, his face panicked. I followed him, dizzy, barely forming coherent thoughts, I was so tired.

"I don't think you need that, Kate," said Locke. Kate just looked at him. "Whatever you're looking for, maybe I can help," he told Desmond. Des turned and fixed him in an angry, hopeless glare.

"Can you fix a computer?" John shrugged. "Then you can't help me, can you?" growled Desmond.

"Sayid can fix a computer," said Kate suddenly, looking at me. I nodded as the room spun.

"Get him. Go and get Sayid."

"Can you get back up that rope?" asked Jack. Kate and I both looked to the frantic Desmond.

"I won't have to; there's got to be a front door in this place."

"Down the corridor to the left. Be persistent, the wheel sticks." Kate nodded.

"I'll go with you," I said suddenly, and she looked at me.

"Katty, I'm not sure that's such a good idea-"

"I don't really feel like staying here, so-"

"Gotcha!" exclaimed Desmond and Kate looked from me to him and back again. There was an apologetic look on her face.

"Look, Katty, you'll just slow me down, okay?"

"Oh," I said, too tired to be really offended. "Okay."

She gave me a small smile and grasped my hand as she slid past us.

"Guys, I think I'm gonna- I think I'm gonna go to bed," I said moments later, my words slurring as I blinked, trying to keep the room in focus. Desmond looked up at me, incredulous.

"The bloody world is going to end and you're taking a nap?"

"It's not gonna end, Desmondo," I muttered, and in a heartbeat, he was in front of me, grabbing my arms and shaking me.

"How the hell do you know my name?" he shouted. I blinked up at him.

"Same way I know that before you got in the island, you were in a solo race 'round the world hosted by Charles Widmore. I know you entered the race so that you could marry his daughter. Penny."

He was staring at me. I sighed. "I know that when you got to the island, a man named Kelvin Inman brought you here an' told you about the button. I know that he lied t' you. An' I know what he lied t' you about."

I took a deep breath, staring up into his shocked brown eyes. He would understand, in a few weeks. He would be the one person I could trust. Jack and Locke were watching us, Locke's brow furrowed, and Jack's eyes wide.

"I know wha's gonna happen t' you after you leave here, in a few minutes," I said quietly. "I know wha's gonna happen when ya get back. I know what's gonna happen when you turn the key."

His face contorted slightly and I nodded. "Yeah, Des, that key. I know what's going to happen after you turn the key. And," I was whispering down, leaning forward so that only he could hear me, "I know when you'll be reunited with Penny."

He pulled away, his eyes wide and his face shocked.

"Des, trust me, in a few weeks yer gonna understand all this a little too well. Can I go to bed now?" I asked, exhausted.

He stepped away, speechless, staring at me, and I pushed past them, stumbling into the bedroom, kicking my shoes of and placing my gun on the bedside table and crawling into bed.

I was fast asleep within seconds.

-

"_Well, you've really gone and done it now," said Ben. We were in a place I didn't recognize. It looked like some kind of bar, dark and smoky, but everyone was talking in a foreign language- Hindi, it sounded like. It seemed like Ben and I were the only two westerners in the bar._

"_What do you mean?"_

"_I mean, Katie," he said my name with a mocking note in his voice, his eyes widening, "that you've started the chain."_

_A couple chattering in Hindi pushed past us, their voices warping. Ben's eyes, wide and blue, fixed onto me._

"_The hatch," clarified Ben. "If your people didn't open the hatch none of this would have ever happened. This is the real beginning of the end."_

"_They're not my people, Benjamin," I said. "You know that."_

"_Do I?" he asked, raising his eyebrows._

"_You should," I said quietly. He chuckled._

"_You'll be meeting me in a few days," he said._

"_I know. You won't recognize me."_

"_Won't I? This is my dream too, you know."_

_I took his hand, rough and warm, in mine, and looked up at him._

"_Wake up, Benjamin."_

_-_

On the other side of the island, wide blue eyes opened and Ben sat up, glancing around his study, the blue eyes and shark-like grin of a girl he'd never met not yet faded from his mind.

**-**

**Day Forty-Seven**

"Hello," said Jacob.

"I remember where I know you from now," I told him. We were in the same room we'd been in last time, underground, with candles burning. He wore all white and stood several feet away from me.

"You were the man in the airport."

A small smile crossed his face, but he said nothing.

"You touched me," I said. "You grabbed my shoulder."

The smile widened.

"Why did it let me live?" I asked quietly. Jacob's ancient eyes bored into mine as his smile turned into a grin and his eyes twinkled with some ancient secret.

"It let you live," he said, "because you can't die."

**LOST

* * *

**

"Electric Blue" by the Cranberries.

A/N: SEASON TWO, BABY! So, how many people saw Elliot coming back? I sure was planning ti for a while and OMG YOUSE GUYS WE'RE MEETING BENRY THIS SEASON. I CAN'T WAIT.

Like I said in the rating, this story is going to be darker than ARLH. Still work friendly and still light reading, but darker and with more sex. In short, it'll just be a much more mature story than ARLH. But I think people are going to enjoy it.

DON'T FREAK OUT ABOUT WHAT JACOB SAID. ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED. :)

(i'msoexcitedaboutbenry)

Love,

Sarah.


	2. Special

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking **_**by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**_Something always brings me back to you.  
It never takes too long._

_No matter what I say or do I'll still feel you here 'til the moment I'm gone.  
You hold me without touch._

_You keep me without chains.  
Set me free, leave me be. I don't want to fall another moment into your gravity.  
_

_You loved me 'cause I'm fragile.  
When I thought that I was strong.  
But you touch me for a little while and all my fragile strength is gone.  
_

_You're neither friend nor foe though I can't seem to let you go.  
The one thing that I still know is that you're keeping me down_

**Chapter Two: Special.**

I awoke with a start, my eyes snapping open. I wondered, for a moment, were the hell I was. My back didn't hurt like it normally did after sleeping in the sand. My head was supported by something soft and cool and soft sheets slid over my feet.

I blinked up at the bottom of the bunk above me, memories returning.

Sawyer.

Trek.

Black Rock.

Explosion.

Monster.

Elliot.

Desmond.

Hatch.

Bed.

Ben.

Jacob.

Holy freaking crap, Jacob.

_You can't die, you can't die, you can't die, you can't die-_

The words echoed through-out my brain like a mantra.

"It was a dream," I muttered to myself. "It wasn't real."

I saw Jacob's face in my head, that wide, knowing smile.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, shaking my head. It felt like there was a small, fuzzy animal in my mouth and I could taste my bad breath. My skin felt greasy and oily and gross.

I rose unsteadily to my feet and made my way past Locke, who was sleeping on the couch, into the storage room. I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and conditioner, a razor, a bar of soap, and body wash, and made my way to the bathroom.

For the first time in over a month, I was going to take an actual shower. That just made me so happy.

I walked into the old bathroom and shut the door behind me before turning to see on of the most frightening things I'd seen on this island.

My reflection.

I mean, I had a small plane of glass in my tent that could inform me if I'd broken out or if my hair was absolutely horrific, but this thing was full length and in harsh lighting.

Part of me thought I looked super hot. Sure, I was short, but I was curvy and had a pretty nice body, at the risk of sounding conceited. My breasts were larger than average and my hips were wide, but my waist and legs were thin and muscular, making me look stream-lined. I had a fairly pretty face; I didn't consider myself to be stunning or beautiful, but there was something about my face that made people look again. Probably my eyes or my lips, or maybe the combination of features that looked so wrong separately, but just worked, together, somehow.

On the other hand, I looked completely different than I had before the island. It wasn't something physical so much as the look behind my body- whereas previously I'd carried myself as an average teenager would, casually and a little slouched, I now stood straight and at attention, as though my body was a tightly coiled spring. I was alert, all the time, even during sleep, and that really took it out of a person. My eyes were skittish and somehow harder than I remembered, and even my mouth (the lips that had always reminded me of Elvis Presley) was set in a firmer, straight line.

I'd lost weight, too. Not significant, but I was lean and hard, my body slinky and coiled and ready to attack at any given time. My hair was long and shaggy and layered, falling in thick, almost golden waves around my face and down to the middle of my shoulder blades, past my collarbones.

I grasped the bottom hem of my shirt and lifted it over my head, my torso stretching, revealing my significantly paler, muscled stomach and nude-colored bra. My stomach was covered in a myriad of thin, red scratches, and my guess as to where they'd come from was as good as anyone's. Since coming to the island, I was used to being in an almost constant state of discomfort, and the scratches had barely bothered me.

I reached up behind my back to unclasp my bra and it fell to the floor of the hatch and I stared at myself in the mirror, shirtless and wearing only jeans, my messy, flyaway hair not even beginning to cover my breasts. I stared at the foreign and yet, so familiar girl in the mirror and she stared back at me, her blue eyes thoughtful and judging and unblinking.

"We've been through hell together," I told her, before twisting around to examine my scarred back.

It wasn't a pretty sight. After the explosion in Venice almost two months ago, my back had healed very quickly, but not cleanly. Simply put, my upper back looked like a mass of scar tissue.

There were long slashes two of my fingers wide and shorter scratches that were pencil thin, all looping over each other. Burn marks mixed with oddly shaped lacerations gave my back a rough, textured look. Some of the scars were raised significantly, but most of them, people only noticed when they hugged me or saw me shirtless.

The scars weren't just on my back, though that was where they were the worst. The backs of my biceps had their share of scrapes, though those were mostly thin and hard to see.

I unbuttoned my tight jeans and slipped them and my underwear off in a jerky move.

The thin slashes continued down my backside on onto the tops of my thighs though they, like the marks on my arms, were much harder to see than those on my back.

I sighed, my body twisted, as I regarded my scarred body. I hadn't tried to fool myself into thinking the scars were attractive in anyway at all. They were ugly and embarrassing and I hated them.

But there was something striking, something that they gave me that hadn't been there before. Carrying those scars around- well, it felt like I was carrying the world on my back. They made me someone different. Someone who could be hard and cold and dangerous and even deadly.

Someone who should have been dead.

_**-Flashback-**_

_She stumbled out the back entrance of the hotel in Venice amidst the confusion, only beginning to feel the pain in her back. Her mind, logical and icy even when in a crisis, informed her that she wouldn't be able to explain why she'd gone up to her hotel room after being harmed in the explosion, and there was no way she could explain about Elliot or what she'd done._

_So her newly-found survival instincts kicked into gear and led her out of the hotel._

_The city, understandably, was in chaos. Smoke rose over the buildings in the distance, and Katty's heart hardened as she thought of the four bodies lying in the center of the blast. People stood in the streets, staring, shouting in languages she didn't understand, people screamed, pushing past her, ambulances wailed and deep voices sounded through mega-phones. The entire city was a blur of color and noise that she fought to understand._

_She approached a man in a Venetian police uniform, tapping his shoulder lightly with a shaking hand. Shock and adrenaline were wearing off, and the pain in her back was increasing. People were beginning to stare at her, at the pretty Westerner with the gashed shirt and bloody back._

_The man turned to her, revealing a kind, middle-aged face with a beard and dark eyes under bushy eyebrows._

"_Please," she said, her voice quiet and weakening as she lost blood, her hands shaking, "please help me."_

"_I'm a little busy at the moment," he said, compassion in his eyes and in his thickly accented voice, but she shook her head, the movement making her dizzy. It had been almost fifteen minutes since the explosion, and she'd been loosing blood steadily since then._

"_No," she said, her voice even weaker. "My back. I was in the explosion."_

_His kind eyes widened in alarm and he grasped her shoulders, turning her around. She heard him swear in angry Italian as her back came into view. People were beginning to crowd now, cameras clicked. She stared at them, hard, looked into the flashes, knowing soon, her face would be plastered all over the world as a survivor- possibly the first from this explosion- of a terrorist attack._

_But really, she was a survivor of something much worse._

_The policeman was shouting something in Italian now and the sound of an ambulance was coming closer and Katty saw, with a faint tinge of surprise, that it was a boat. The cop, afraid to touch her back, took her hand and led her through the crowds. She kept her head up and met people's eyes and didn't cry. It was important that everyone saw her strong, because she felt stronger than she ever had in her life._

_She was a murderer._

_She could survive whatever life threw at her, now._

_She stepped into the ambulance and the Venetian equivalent of EMTs surrounded her, asked her questions in broken English, asking the cop questions in perfect, rapid Italian._

"_Who should we contact?" the cop asked her as she was settled on her stomach in an odd cot that had a hole for her face, as a gas mask was strapped over her nose and mouth and an IV was hooked into her arm, one giving her oxygen and the other, morphine. The girl's lids flickered, the bright blue eyes behind them dimming as thins began blurring and the drug took effect. The dark eyes of the cop became the light eyes of Elliot as she drifted off somewhere where things were safe._

"_Elliot," she mumbled. "Elliot."_

_-_

"John, do you know what time it is?" I asked, walking out of the hallway that lead to the hatch bathroom to see Locke going through books in the shelves and putting back the ones that Des had pitched to the floor.

He reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a watch.

"Almost five. You slept for about twelve hours," he said, smiling that calm, reassuring smile, I crossed my arms across my chest and grinned back at him, leaning against that concrete wall of the hatch.

" 'S the longest I've slept consecutively since we got here."

He glanced at me and laughed, shaking his head, putting a few more books on the shelves.

"What?" I asked, nonplussed.

"Not every day you hear a teenager usin' a word like "consecutively" in everyday conversation," he said, his grin widening.

"I'm not an ordinary teenager, Locke."

"No," he said, still grinning, turning back to his books. "No, you're not."

I pulled my shoes back on, said good bye to Locke and, after wrestling with the wheel on the door, I was happily tromping my way through the jungle and back to the beach, my gun stuck down the front of my jeans, my clean and wet hair pulled back into a french braid, my sore muscles stretching in a way that was both painful and nice.

I shoved my hands down the pockets of my jeans as leaves crunched under my shoes, humming happily under my breath as I made my way through the beautiful green jungle.

Somewhere on the other side of the island, Sawyer and Jin and Michael would be making their way back across the Island with what remained of the Taillies, and tomorrow, I'd have to do my damndest to save Shannon from death and my best friend from the same heart-break I'd suffered. Sayid wouldn't recover from Shannon's death for a long time, and though I didn't really like the blonde girl, I didn't want her to die.

I'd loved her brother, after all.

But now, as the afternoon light filtered down through the thick foliage of the jungle, as I inhaled the scent of nature, birds singing and insect chirping around me, everything was good.

And then a blonde man with green eyes stepped out of the jungle into my path and I stopped, glaring at him. He raised his hands, placating.

"I just want to talk," he said, eyebrows raised.

"Yeah?" I snapped. "I don't really feel like talking."

I brushed roughly past him, not meeting his eyes, but he grasped my bicep and I stopped, anger thudding in my stomach, my jaw clenched.

"Will you listen, then?"

I turned back to him, wrenching out of his grasp, and put my hands on my hips, regarding him with a raised eyebrow. He stared down at me and sighed.

"You aren't gonna make this easy, are you?"

My eyes widened in anger and I gritted my jaw tighter to stop myself from screaming at him.

"Look, what happened in Venice was an accident, I never intended for them to get as close to us as they did," he said, trying in vain to explain his actions, while I just looked stonily at him. Venice wasn't what I was pissed about.

He looked at me. "I'm sorry."

That did it.

"Sorry?" I said, my voice quiet with disbelief. "You _died_, Elliot! You were bleeding all over me and you couldn't even tell me-"

"I didn't die," he said hastily, flooring me. I blinked once. Twice. The birds were still singing, but the cheerful song contrasted with the anger flowing through me.

"What?"

"I thought I did, but I didn't." He exhaled, running a big hand through his blonde hair. "It's very difficult to kill people like Richard and I."

"_What_?"

"I never died, Katty."

"… _how_?"

"We heal quickly," he said, and my heart thudded in my stomach.

" 'We' "? I repeated, my voice stunned. He looked at me quizzically.

"Richard and I."

"Okay," I said, finding my voice. "Okay. But even if the bullets didn't kill you, the explosion-"

"I healed," he stressed.

"Then why aren't you burned?" I hissed, thinking of my own scars. He looked down at me, pity in his eyes.

"Because I _healed_, Katty. It takes a good deal to scar people like me. A lot more than some fire, at any rate-"

"How old are you?" I said, my voice almost a whisper. He just looked at me.

"Old."

"Give me some friggin' answers!" I hissed, pointing a quivering finger at him. He, like his brother, didn't blink. "How old are you? What the hell did you mean when you said I was special? What," I growled, stepping closer to him, "the fuck in going on here?"

He said nothing.

"WHAT DID YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAID I WAS SPECIAL?" I bellowed, and birds took off from the trees with indignant screeches.

"I can't tell you that yet."

"Why the hell not?"

He just looked down at me, some ancient mystery written in his eyes, a mystery that somehow involved me.

"Because of what you would do."

I glared up at him, trying to cover my shocked silence.

"How old are you?" I growled, and he sighed.

"I don't know, exactly."

"Guess."

"I was born in what you would now call Norway," he said matter-of-factly, his eyes glowing. "My parents were Vikings, descendants from Romans who'd occupied Britain several centuries earlier."

His eyes bored down into me. "That was before the birth of Jesus Christ."

My heart thudded as I realized that before me was an unknown wonder of the ancient world. He was thousands of years old. I suddenly felt very, very young. To this man, I wasn't even a flicker in existence.

"Richard?" I asked, my voice quiet.

"Richard is Egyptian."

"How are you two-"

"We aren't really brothers," said Elliot. "I guess a more correct way of saying it is that I'm his nephew."

My mind was whirring.

"How-"

"I was descended from his brother, one of the soldiers who went to Britain. Richard is a century or two older than me."

Old. So very, very old. Ancient, really. I looked away from those piercing green eyes, turning my back on him and shaking my head.

The problem wasn't that I couldn't grasp how old they were. The problem was that I could grasp it.

"Why?" I said finally, turning back to him. "Why you two?"

"Jacob chose us."

"Why?"

For the first time, a smile crossed his face. "You'll have to ask Jacob."

"How am I special?" I asked again, and the smile melted right off his face.

"Katty, please-"

"No, no, no. For the past month, I've tried to keep my head down, I've let things play out how they're supposed to, watched someone else die, just so things would stay the same. I haven't asked questions. I've been a good little girl and kept all this secret. But now, _now_, I want some friggin' answers!"

I'd seen Elliot a lot of ways. I've seen him icy, I've seen him warm and welcoming, I've seen him with desire and intoxication laced in his growl of a voice, and I've seen him splattered with blood and bullet ridden.

But this was the first time I'd seen him angry.

"You think you have it hard?" he asked, his voice a growl as his eyes flashed at me. "Wanna trade jobs? Cause next to mine, yours is a piece of cake. If you weren't so damn selfish, maybe you could see that-"

My jaw dropped and every wall containing my anger and frustration dropped. For the first time since arriving on the island, I cracked.

I'd been pissed before, annoyed, irritated to the point of murder, but now, for the first time since the man in front of me had died, I was truly angry.

"Okay, I'm a selfish little bitch. I'm sorry I don't have the perspective of a thousand years on my side, but you know what I do have, Elliot freaking Alpert?"

I gestured in the direction of the beach. "All those lives. In my hands. I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS!

"You met me in Venice," I growled, my voice dangerously low. "You told me that I was special, which is so much BS, because I'd never done anything interesting or dangerous or special in my goddamn life before meeting _you_! I was ordinary! Average! Nothing special about me, nothing at all! And then there you were, like freaking Hagrid, telling me these things. Then you_ died_, and I was left with a smoking gun and scars on my back.

"I get on a plane, and suddenly, everything changes again. Suddenly, I'm inside a fucking TV show! I survive the crash, and I keep my head down, don't tell people what I know. I make some friends. I fall in love with a man I know is gonna die! Then, joy of joys, I meet your brother. Your uncle. Does he tell me you're still alive? Give me anything to cling to? No, the hell he does! He takes your son, the only person I could love without fear because I didn't know what was going to happen to him, away from me.

"Boone died. Another man I cared about, died, in my arms. But still, I keep my head down, I don't ask questions. And you, you were alive the WHOLE FUCKING TIME!"

I took a deep breath. There was some shock in those endless eyes and my throat hurt from screaming at him.

"I'm not some ancient immortal, Alpert! I'm a freakin' teenager! I'm tired of not knowing things. I'm tired _of_ knowing things!"

He grasped my chin, gently, forcing me to look up into those eyes, so much like Richard's, but a bright, piercing green.

"You will know," he said quietly, his eyes searching mine. "But not yet."

He looked at me hesitantly, considering something, before crushing me to his chest in a tight hug.

"I couldn't tell you," he murmured. "It would have broken you. You weren't strong enough to deal with it, not yet."

I blinked back tears, clinging to his collared shirt.

"I didn't want this for you, Katty. Not at all. And I'm so, so sorry."

He pulled away, looking down into my eyes again.

"I care about you immensely, Katty. Be safe."

And just like that, he was gone, leaving me, standing in the darkening jungle, my heart pounding and my throat hurting.

I turned and began trudging my way back to the beach, my hands shoved in my pockets, no longer humming, no longer happy, but at least I had some kind of closure now.

I sighed, regarding the jungle in front of me. The back was maybe ten minutes away.

"Damn immortals."

**LOST

* * *

**

"Gravity" by Sara Barellies. Katty's feelings towards Elliot and, to a lesser extend, 's a very fitting song for the three of them.

A/N: Alrighty, chapter two. Next chapter.... the action picks up. Like, FAST. It's gonna be big. You're gonna love it :). So, yeah... I normally try very hard to stick strictly to canon, but I took some liberties in this chapter with Richard's background. Some people think he came over on the Black Rock, but I still think he's an Egyptian. And It's going to be a plot device. Not too major, just in case I'm wrong, but if it turns out he DID come over on the black rock, I'm just gonna.... ignore that. :). Also, I had a lot of fun with the Katty/Elliot scene in this. Before anyone starts wondering, no, they're not going to get together. Katty would never be able to trust him enough after Venice, but, as you can see, there's still lots of tension and angst, wich is gonna be SUPER FUN to work with. Hope you enjoyed, as always, PLEASE REVIEW!

Sarah.


	3. About A Girl And A Gun

_**That's **_**_Why My Hand Was Shaking_ by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**

_The perfect words never crossed my mind,  
Cuz there was nothin' in there but you.  
I felt every ounce of me screaming out,  
But the sound was trapped deep in me.  
All I wanted just sped right past me,  
While I was rooted fast to the earth,  
I could be stuck here for a thousand years,  
Without your arms to drag me out._

There you are standing right in front of me  
There you are standing right in front of me  
All this fear falls away to leave me naked,  
Hold me close, cause I need you to guide me to safety.

No, I don't want to wait forever

In the confusion and the aftermath,  
You are my signal fire.  
The only resolution and the only joy,  
Is the faint spark of forgiveness in your eyes.

**Chapter Three: About A Girl And A Gun**

**Day Forty-Eight**

I was running as fast as I could, perpendicular to Shannon, leaping over foliage, ignoring the rain splattering over my face. Branches and leaves slashed at my face and arms, and I knew that I was bleeding, but I didn't care. If this worked, I would be in much more pain in a few minutes, anyway. Now I could hear them, I could see her through the bushes. There was a flash of pink and of bright blonde hair and I could hear Sayid calling out her name. My heart was pounding and I didn't have time to think.

I jumped out, ignoring the ferns and trees scratching at my bare legs and arms, arms spread wide, yelling, placing myself in front of Shannon, sliding in the mud-

There was a bang, and I stopped moving, hunching over slightly, my eyes wide as I tried to gasp for air and stared, shocked, in front of me. Somewhere behind me, I heard Shannon gasp.

I'd never been shot before, and the sensation was… unforgettable. Painful, and unforgettable. I felt the bullet pass right under my collarbone, snapping it, and I felt it go through my shoulder blade. I gasped and choked, the shout dying in my throat, the pain and the shock too intense to even breathe. I met Ana Lucia's eyes as she stared at me from behind the gun, realization dawning in her flat black eyes.

I didn't blame her.

I fell to my knees in what seemed like slow motion, snapping twigs that lay on the ground as my knees sunk into the rain soaked mud, the jungle swimming in a pain-induced haze in front of me. I saw Ana Lucia, holding the gun up, a horrified, disbelieving and helpless expression on her hard face. I saw Michael and Jin, staring at me in disbelieving horror. Mr. Eko looked detachedly shocked, and Libby's eyes were wide. I blinked, distracted by the excruciating agony in the left side of my chest. I was surprised that I could form a coherent thought, the pain was so overwhelming. I wanted to bury my face into the jungle floor and scream till the pain went away.

Somewhere, deep in my mind, the always-analytical part of my brain informed me that the bullet had probably passed through an artery if not my heart itself and I was probably going to die. The rest of me hurt so much that I didn't care. I felt tears streaming down my face as I tilted to the side and face planted in the jungle floor.

The rain splattered against me, and it felt like it was burning. Acid rain. The pain was so _much_… I heard Sayid yelling my name and saw, vaguely, from the corner of my eye, him get tackled by Eko. I watched the fight with a disinterested air, gasping for breath through the pain, and then Sayid fell next to me, and grasped my face with his big hands. Tears and rain were coursing down his cheeks and he lifted my face up, his hands shaking. My eyes struggled to focus on him. His brown eyes were begging me to say something, and I saw his lips moving. It looked like they were saying my name. I wanted to reach out to him, but I was so tired…. Why wouldn't he just let me go?

And then, without warning, the comforting heat of his hands was gone and I saw the ground in front of me as my head fell back to the jungle floor with a dull thud. There were voices now, and the rain had stopped. They were talking, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Sayid being tied to a tree and I heard Ana's voice. Out of nowhere, feet came into my view. I strained to look up and saw Mr. Eko, carrying Sawyer over his shoulder. There was a distant grunt and then I was being cradled awkwardly in his strong arms. The position wasn't comfortable- he was only fully supporting me with one arm, the other hooked around my legs and hitched up, holding onto Sawyer's back to keep him in place. As a result, my chest was squashed against the tall black man's, my head lolling, chest burning.

I moaned every so often in pain as Eko carried us through the jungle, but was mostly silent. At least, I think I was. I didn't see much, but at the same time, I saw everything- Mr Eko's stoic dark face, a glimpse of dark shirt, flashes of green, startling red when I looked at my own shoulder.

Hell, it _hurt_.

All I could think about was Shannon. Had she lived?

My gut told me no.

I heard laughing, from far away, and felt Eko stop moving. I tried my damndest to keep my eyes open when I heard Kate's gasp, and then there was movement again. I fought to keep my eyes open and to understand what was happening as Sawyer was transferred to the arms of a white-faced Jack. Eko held me closer to him, steadying me as much as he could, trying not to jostle my broken body. I could hear him praying. I was loosing consciousness, a part of me wondering why the hell I wasn't dead already.

I had all the strength of a rag doll, and my eyelids were flickering, only giving me glimpses of what was happening around me. I saw flashes of green, of a dark red shirt, of black skin, and then Sawyer's dear face, then worried brown eyes.

And then everything rushed out of my sight, leaving only black, taking the pain away. My head fell back over Eko's arm, and I knew nothing.

-

The hatch.

Being transferred, again, from one set of arms to another.

Jack's pale, tense face.

Worried words from Kate's mouth.

John.

A cold table against my back.

A very bright light.

My shirt being torn off.

Blood on Jack's big hands.

Pain.

Lots of pain.

-

"You really don't know how to stay out of trouble, do you?" asked Jacob, kneeling in front of me. I was lying in the couch in the hatch, my legs dangling off one end of it. My shoulder didn't hurt anymore and I glanced down to see that it was bandaged.

There was a glint of anger in his eyes.

"I couldn't just _let_ her die-"

"And what good did this do? Getting yourself shot?" He gestured vaguely to my shoulder before looking into my eyes, his face harder than normal.

"I wanted to save her," I said quietly.

"But you don't like her."

"No, but-"

"Then why?"

"Because Sayid loves her," I mumbled, and something changed in his eyes as he rocked back on his heels, head tilting backwards as he regarded me. " An' cause she's a person, and I hafta try if I can-"

"Would you die to bring her back?"

My heart thudded as I stared into his endless eyes. Would I die, would I give everything up, to bring back a girl that I didn't even like, as he'd so aptly said?

The answer came, quick and resounding, and a kind of peace settled over my battered heart.

"Yes."

I wasn't a hero or a saint or a martyr. But dammit, I could be noble too. He smiled slightly, looking away from me and shaking his head.

"I'm afraid it's too late for that, Katty."

-

I awoke with a start, my eyes snapping open, and the first thing I noticed was a sharp burning in my shoulder. The pain was the most intense where the bullet had actually entered, of course, but it was sore all around, too. My head was pounding and I was thirsty. My entire body ached.

I blinked a few times, remembering the most recent dream concerning Jacob, and wondering what the hell it meant. I was alert but still slightly groggy and in a hell of a lot of pain.

I tried to sit up but my shoulder protested and I whimpered. I saw that it was bandaged (the white was shockingly bright against my tanned skin) and lay back down on the pillow with a noise that was half a sigh and half a sob of frustration. Sayid was sitting at the bar, head in his hands, shoulders shaking. Ice filled my stomach as soon as I saw him and my heart thudded.

"Sayid?" I called quietly.

He looked up sharply, making no effort to hide the tears on his face or his red-rimmed eyes. He was pale. In a flash, he was by my side with a glass of water, which I swallowed gratefully, my hands closing around the cool, damp glass, my throat parched, then looked up at him. I was afraid to ask.

"Shannon-"

His shoulders tensed but he didn't look away. His eyes began shining and I felt tears of my own well up

_Oh, no…_

"Did she live?"

"No." His voice was tight. "The bullet went straight through both of you."

I stared at him, horrified, a knife in my heart, as tears began to leak down my face. I struggled to sit up, pain be damned, and put my arms around him as I began to sob.

"Oh my god. Oh, God- I'm so sorry- I didn't get there fast enough- I'm so sorry-" I was whispering, my throat hoarse.

One of his hands pressed against my back and the other was on the back of my head, his head buried in the hollow of my neck and good shoulder.

"No, Katty," he said, looking up at me, his beautiful brown eyes red and full of tears. "Thank you. Thank you for trying."

I just looked at him, tears coursing down my face, at a loss of words. Despite the fact that someone I'd loved dearly had died too, I had no idea what to say to this man- to my best friend.

So I just held him, the way Sawyer had done for me.

-

In the bedroom, Jack had succeeded in getting Sawyer's temperature down, and he, Sawyer, was now confessing his love for Kate or Katty. Jack couldn't tell.

"I love her," he mumbled for what had to be the tenth time. Jack shook his head.

"Who?"

"Ka-Ka-"

"Yeah, got that part. Which one?"

"Both of 'em… I love 'er…"

That was new. Jack straightened up, then turned sharply at a sound to see a pale, exhausted looking Katty in the doorway, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. A month on the island had turned her once pale skin very dark, but now, she looked almost like she used too. She was gaunt, with deep circles under her unfocused eyes, her skin white, and she was shaking slightly. Sayid was supporting her, and he didn't look much better than she did.

Jack stood up, facing them. "Katty, you need to be lying down. You've lost a lot of blood, you need rest-"

He knew that saying she had lost "a lot of blood" was doing a grave injustice to how close to death she'd been. Images of her still body, lying on the table, covered in blood, seemed to the doctor to be something out of a horror movie.

But it had been real, very real- so real her blood was still on his hands.

"I'm okay, Jack. How is he?" she asked softy, looking at Sawyer with bloodshot blue eyes and nodding. Jack turned back to Sawyer.

"He should be fine, but he's got a long way to go. Talk to him, see if you can bring him around."

"Okay," she said, still softly. It unnerved Jack to see the normally loud and slightly egotistical girl so quiet, so defeated. She looked like she was about to burst into tears at any moment, but there was still a subtle kind of strength emanating from her exhausted young body. Sayid helped her over to the bed and she lowered herself gingerly into the chair Jack had just vacated, her legs shaking.

"Sawyer?" she asked, reaching up to brush some hair out of his eyes. He mumbled something intelligible and turned his head into her hand but didn't do anything else. Jack's eyes, though, were fixed on Katty. She was regarding Sawyer with such a soft, adoring and worried expression that she almost looked like a different girl. There was something in her eyes as she looked at Sawyer that Jack had never seen on her face before. She loved the man lying prostate in that bed- maybe not like she'd loved Boone, but she loved him all the same.

"It's me, Katty. I told you I'd tell you how I knew everything later. I knew this would happen, remember?"

She laughed softly and Sawyer's closed eyes flickered slightly as he turned his head, lips opening and closing. The girl tightened her grip on his hand, stroking the side of his face and his dirty hair very gently.

"Katty…" he murmured. Something seemed to wake up in Katty's face, just as something else seemed to die in Sayid's. Seeing that the man's need was greater than the girl's, Jack went to stand next to him.

"How are you, Sayid?"

The Arab just looked up at him, his eyes dark and red, and Jack chuckled darkly. "You're right. Stupid question."

"More importantly, how is she?" Sayid nodded to Katty, lowering his voice. Jack looked at her too. She was holding Sawyer's tan hand in her white one, stroking it and talking to him quietly, that look still on her face. She didn't seem to have heard a word.

Jack looked at Sayid, wondering at how much to tell him. The Arab stared stoically back at him, unblinking and unflinching.

Finally, Jack shook his head and said quietly, "Honestly, Sayid, she should be dead. That bullet broke her chest plate and she lost… so much of her blood. And if that didn't do it… the bullet should have _shattered_ her chest plate instead of fracturing it. It's a miracle she's alive."

Sayid took a step closer to Jack, looking up at the doctor with broken eyes. "I don't believe in miracles."

"Neither do I, Sayid. But she's here, and that's… that's not normal." He was shaking his head slightly as he met Sayid's eyes.

They both looked over at her, where a pale, shaky hand was slowly pushing Sawyer's dirty hair off his sweaty forehead. Katty was slouching in the chair, giving into the bad posture she normally tried to fight, the blanket still tucked around her shoulders, her messy, still damp hair sticking up everywhere.

"She did everything she could, you know," said Jack quietly, looking back at the shorter man, whose eyes were still trained on the girl. He looked up at Jack but didn't say anything.

"She was ready to die, to save Shannon. She started talking once we got some of John's blood into her, and she said something like that."

"I almost wish she had," Sayid murmured without thinking, and Jack's eyes widened. Sayid's expression was mixed with guilt and shame and shock, and Jack didn't say anything, praying that Katty, for her sake, hadn't heard.

They both looked back at Katty, trying to forget what Sayid had said. The girl looked over at them and gave them an empty, tired smile. They returned one.

_I almost wish she had._

_--_

**A few hours earlier**

"Jack, what do we do?" Kate's voice was, understandably, panicked.

"You take him," said Jack, his words sharp as he heaved Sawyer to Kate. She was very strong, but she sagged under six plus feet of dead weight. "Get him in the shower. We need to try to bring his fever down."

Turning away from Kate and Sawyer, Jack took Katty's body from Eko. The girl was in infinitely more critical condition in the man, and Sawyer's condition was very critical. Kate's eyes, wide and frantic, sought her friend's bleeding body.

"Is she going to be okay-?"

"Take care of Sawyer, Kate," said Jack, not meeting her eyes. "I'll do what I can for her."

The answer hung in the air between them. Both of them knew she wasn't going to live and, if she did, it was going to take a miracle. Kate nodded, biting back tears, and began half-dragging Sawyer's unconscious body into the bathroom. Seconds later, Jack heard the water start.

"Jack, what-" asked John, storming out of the computer room, bewildered, his eyes flicking over the scene, taking in the stoic Eko, the urgent Jack, and the blood-soaked body of a girl they'd all come to regard as invincible.

"Clear off that table!" shouted Jack. With a swipe of his arm, John sent the contents of the table to the floor with a clatter.

"Get me bandages, lots of alcohol, and a knife," said Jack, laying the limp body of the teenager on the table. She flopped on the table, her body giving no resistance, her mouth slightly open, her eyes stationary behind their lids. The harsh lights illuminated the gaunt features, and suddenly she looked thirty instead of sixteen. Jack ripped off her bloodstained shirt and bra and tossed them aside- they were only going to get in his way, and out of respect for the girl, he tried not to look at her chest. The same blood that had stained his shirt was now leaking on to the table, but slower- she was loosing too much of it

"Dammit, dammit, dammit," swore Jack. He grabbed the girl's wrist, twisted, and pulled, and with a sickening crack and a jerk, her left arm reconnected with its socket. Katty was still unconscious, her eyes closed and her mouth open, her breathing faint, her skin loosing color. Jack felt her chest, his fingers probing gently- her chest plate was fractured around the bullet hole, but it, alone, wouldn't be fatal.

But if she lost any more blood, she was going to die.

At that moment, John rushed in, carrying alcohol and bandages. He paused when he saw her, lying on the table, shirtless and bloody, with Jack standing over her, his own shirt covered in blood. It must have looked like a scene from a horror movie. It certainly felt like one.

"Here, Jack, this is all I could find," he said, panting. "How is she?"

Jack didn't bother to answer, just grabbed alcohol and poured it over the hole in her shoulder. The wound fizzled and bubbled, blood washing away in streaks, cleaning the area around the hole.

"Is she still unconscious?" asked John, coming to stand next to him.

"Yes, thank god." Jack didn't want to think about the kind of pain the kid would be in if she lived through this.

"How much blood-"

"Too much," said Jack shortly. "Find me some tape."

After cleaning both the entry wound and exit wound as best he could, Jack stitched her up as much as he could, though he knew that, if she lived, she would be carrying two circular scars for the rest of her life.

After taping the bandage over her shoulder, Jack stepped back, breathing heavily, lowering her back onto the table gently after stitching up the exit wound in her back. Any other time, he would have been distracted by an attractive, shirtless young girl pressed against him, but now, all he could think about was keeping his young friend alive.

He could only hope that her internal injuries weren't severe.

Sawyer was in the next room with an infection that would kill him. Katty would die, too, if she didn't get more blood flowing in her, fast.

"John," he asked suddenly, whirling around. "What blood type are you?"

"O-negative," he said, a little surprised. His green eyes flickered from the lifeless girl under harsh florescent lights to the doctor who was trying to save her life. "Why?"

Jack got the transfusion set up and working and then, when John's blood was flowing into the now blanket-covered Katty, he ran into the shower to find a soaking wet Kate holding a soaking wet Sawyer, huddled up against a wall of the shower. She looked up at him, panic on her face.

"Is she okay?" she asked over the splattering of the shower. Jack shook his head.

"No. But she might be, eventually."

-

I felt like shit.

Shannon was dead.

Sawyer was very close to it, and, according to Jack, I had been, too, about an hour ago.

Part of me swore that I had died.

And then Sayid-

No. I couldn't think about that.

I sat alone in the amoury, huddled in a corner, holding my sore shoulder gingerly through the blankets that were still wrapped around me. My knees were brought up to my chest and I stared at the guns around me, my lips trembling as my vision began blurring.

The door creaked open and I lowered my eyes, hastily rubbing the back of my hand across them, wiping away the tears.

"Hey," said Jack softly and, to my surprise, he closed the door with a soft 'click' behind him and sat down gracefully next to me, his arm barely brushing mine as he regarded me out of those gray eyes.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, his voice kind and quiet. I glanced at him, forcing a weak laugh.

"Like I got shot."

He laughed too.

"It wasn't your fault, you know," he said. I looked up at him, feeling the tears starting again, and said nothing. "You started talking, once we got some more blood in ya. You were worried sick about Shannon, even when you were almost dead- you kept saying you'd die to save her."

Jacob.

"You did an… incredibly brave thing, Katty. We were all worried sick about you- especially Sayid. His heart was breaking, Katty, not just for Shannon, but for you, too."

That did it. I began crying and Jack gingerly put an arm around my shoulders. I leant into him, sobbing my bruised and battered little heart out, thinking about Elliot, about Venice, about Boone and his sister, Sayid, Sawyer, Richard- hell, I was even crying for Jack, thinking about the beard he'd have, about the hell he'd be feeling.

I cried for the whole world, right there in the closet we'd be keeping Ben in about a week, clinging to a spinal surgeon that had now seen me shirtless.

And I didn't care. Jack was my friend, one of the best I'd ever had. Right now, I needed a friend, not a boyfriend or a friend with benefits or a stupid immortal with gorgeous eyes- no, right now, I had just what I needed.

Jack.

-

Sayid had gone down to the beach to begin digging Shannon's grave. I wanted to go join him, but Jack refused, point blank, to let me go anywhere without him. I had a fever and my chest was killing me, of course, but I actually felt okay, apart from that. Very weak and very shaky, but alright. I was functioning which, considering that I'd been almost fatally shot not three hours ago, wasn't that bad of a deal.

Kate stepped out of Sawyer's room for the first time since I'd been awake and her eyes focused on me, sitting at the bar, munching on chocolate and a bottle of scotch. I froze and we stared at each other for a few minutes before we both dissolved into girly shrieks and then we were running across the room, collapsing into hugging each other.

"Oh my god," she said, grinning, relieved. "I thought you were dead!"

"So did I!"

"Oh, I'm so glad you're okay."

We rocked back and forth like the losers we were for a few minutes, squealing and cooing and generally being girls.

When I'd watched the show, I hadn't liked Kate. Sure, she was cool, and tough, and independent, which I really admired, but there was always something about her that grated on me. And when we first got here, too, we hadn't exactly hit it off right away. But now that we actually were friends, and good friends, at that- well, I could safely say that Kate was my best girl friend.

Jack followed her out of the room a few seconds later and smiled, shaking his head at the sight of us.

-

He let me leave the hatch a few hours later, although he was still uncomfortable (understandably) with letting me walk through the jungle alone. But I was a big girl, hole in my chest or no, and I was more than capable of taking care of myself.

I expected to see Richard or Elliot on my way back to the beach, but there was no one. I was alone in that endless jungle with a hole in my chest and a new weight in on my heart.

Shannon was dead.

But at least I'd tried.

-

"Hey."

Sayid glanced up to see Katty standing above him, one arm in a sling. The color of the bandages was shockingly white against her tan chest. She was wearing a white t-shirt too, one that was too big on her, maybe to make the bandages blend in more. Her hair was down, flying around her face, and with the soft glow of the sun behind her, she didn't look entirely real. She was still too pale; her eyes still a little red, her movements oddly shaky and not as graceful as normal.

"How are you?" he asked her quietly. She knelt down next to him, shrugging with one shoulder and giving him that half-smile of hers.

"I've been better. Have you, um, finished the grave-?"

"Yes," he said, shortly, and they sat in silence for a few moments, Katty sneaking glances at him, worried glances, understanding glances. Boone and Shannon's ghosts hovered between them, almost tangible.

"Why all the white?" he asked her, his voice flat. Dead. He remembered how she'd looked after Boone's death, that empty look in her eyes, the almost dead lack of interest that she'd been enveloped in. He understood that, now.

She laughed and ducked her head, sending blonde hair cascading in front of her face as she tugged at the hem over the too-long t-shirt. Sayid realized for the first time that it was one of Jack's.

"Makes the bandages blend in more. I don't want… I don't want her to feel worse than she already does." She looked up at him, a flash of blue against the blonde and the white, as he felt a bit of cold anger clench his stomach. He knew, without a doubt, the woman whom she was speaking of- the woman with the flat black eyes and the gun. The woman who'd shot her.

"And why would you not want her to feel bad? She shot you, Shannon-"

Her eyebrows pulled up, sympathetic, but her mouth was firm. "It was an accident, Sayid-"

"An accident does not change the fact that the woman I loved is dead and that you, yourself, came very close to it-"

"Sayid, I know," she said, her eyebrows pulling up even more, her mouth open slightly. "But we have to forgive her-"

"She shot the woman I loved!" he snarled suddenly, throwing down the pieces of metal in his hands, his eyes flashing. He saw shock in her face, but it was quickly replaced by anger as they both stood up. The clouds that had been threatening rain all afternoon were now darkening the sky, and Sayid felt a raindrop fall on his face. "Don't _tell_ me to forgive her-"

"I will tell you to forgive her," she said flatly, her eyebrows rising.

"She shot-" he was overcome with emotion for a few seconds and found it hard to speak. "She _shot_ Shannon! She killed her!"

"She shot _me_! She very nearly killed _me_!" shouted Katty, taking a step closer to him, her eyes flashing. "And_ I_ can forgive her!"

For a moment Sayid was silent, just glaring down at her. How dare she, the one person he expected to share his hatred, how dare she come preaching to him?

"You- you have no idea-"

"What do I have no idea about, Sayid?" she snarled, as the rain began falling harder. "I've lost someone on this island too, in case you forgot already!"

"I _loved_ her!"

"Yeah, Sayid, I know," she was very angry now, her eyes boiling under the rain. "I heard you, when you were talking to Jack. I _heard_ you tell him that you wished I'd died instead of Shannon."

He felt a flicker of guilt that he knew would hit him ten times harder when he wasn't angry, but he didn't let it show on his face. He just stared down at her as the rain poured down around them. She shook her head.

"All my life I've been second best, Sayid. All my frickin' life, I've been the best friend, the shoulder, the frickin' comic relief, the _whatever_, but with you… with you I was actually stupid enough to think it would be different. That I could be more than just the fall back girl… but I guess I was wrong. I got _shot_!" she shouted suddenly, her eyes wide and her eyebrows narrowed, pointing to the dampening bandages on the left side of her chest. "I got shot trying to save a girl I don't even like cause I loved her brother and cause I love you! And you…" she laughed lowly, just once. "You wish I'd _died_? Damn it, I would have died!" Her eyes were narrowed, but he saw, very clearly, the pain of the betrayal in them.

He didn't know what to say. "If you could choose, between Boone and I, who would you choose?"

"Does it matter?" she said, a hard, helpless laugh in her voice and an ancient pain in her eyes.

"It matters to me!" he roared over the thunder and rain.

"I thought _I_ mattered to you, Sayid." She began backing up slowly, shaking her wet head. "Guess I was wrong."

She turned her back on him and walked slowly through the rain, leaving him to sink back to him knees, alone with his anger and his regret.

As quickly as the rain had started, it stopped.

-

I wasn't too wet.

But I was pissed. And hurt.

I mean, did the damn man think I liked having hot metal scorch through my chest? Did he, really? What the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn't hate Ana; I would have done the same thing. She was just trying to defend her people. This wasn't her fault and eventually, Sayid would see that.

But that wasn't really what hurt. No, what hurt was the knowledge that I'd been willing to die to save someone I didn't even like, for him- and he'd wished I had. That broke my heart.

Ana was kneeling in the sand on the beach over a make-shift fire, holding some fruit and a sharp piece of metal in her hands like she wasn't really sure what to do with it.

Over in the graveyard, next to the grave of my dead lover, there was a new hole in the ground, and I saw the blue-covered body that had been Shannon Rutherford lying next to it.

Taking a deep breath, I strode out into the sand. Ana Lucia looked up when I was just a few feet away, shock floating into her black eyes. I forced myself to grin at her and stuck out a hand.

"Hi. I'm Katty. We haven't officially met-"

"Yeah, we, uh, didn't really have time for that," she said in her low voice as she reached out to shake my hand, her eyes still shocked and wary. I sat down next to her in the sand, careful of my shoulder, and nodded at the mango she was holding.

"Need some help with that?" I asked, and she just looked at me.

"What are you doing here?" she asked finally. I looked at her, and she looked back at me, her eyes flat, her face unyielding but maybe a little bit regretful. "I shot you. Your friend-"

"She wasn't my friend."

"You threw yourself in from of a gun for someone who wasn't your friend." It wasn't a question. I nodded.

"You know the guy who was with her? The Arab?"

"… yeah."

"He's my best friend. Or- well, he was. Look over there." I pointed a short finger at the area beyond the tents, where two crosses stuck out of the sand and a blue-covered body lay next to them. She followed my gaze.

"Underneath one of those crosses is my boyfriend. His name was Boone and I knew he was gonna die but I fell in love with him anyway. He died four days ago, and the girl you shot- Shannon- was his sister. I had to try to save her if I could."

Once again, she just looked at me, and I thought about Boone. His laugh. His jokes. His lame pick-up line boxers. His eyes.

Damn, I missed him.

"How did you know she was gonna die?" Ana asked finally. I sighed, scooping up a handful of sand as watching as it trickled through my fingers.

"That, Ana, is a very long story."

"How do you know my _name_?" she insisted quietly. I glanced over at her.

"You sure you wanna know?" I asked her, and she took a deep breath.

"You know that story about your boyfriend?"

"Boone."

"I've got stories, too, Katty. And trust me, you don't wanna hear them."

I tilted my head back, eyes narrowing.

"How many people have you killed?" I asked finally, and her face hardened. "Three, including Nathan?"

"How the hell-"

"I'll tell you in a minute, but you won't believe me. You wanna know somethin' about me, Ana? I'm sixteen. I'll be seventeen in about three weeks, and you know how many people I've killed?" My eyes bored into hers.

"I know everything that has happened and _will_ happen to every single person on the island- even the Others. Yeah, those Others. Every person that dies, I killed because I did nothing. I actually pulled the trigger four times, three before we got to this island, and once to put a dying man out of his misery. Since then, three people have died, including my boyfriend. You wanna know how I know everything still?"

"Yes."

I took a deep breath.

"It's a TV show."

-

Sleep was successfully evading me. After staring up at the ceiling of my tent for almost and hour, I carefully rolled to my side with a grunt, pulled on my jeans and clipped my bra back on under Jack's shirt, carefully evading the bandages on my chest, and crawled out of my tent, awkwardly cradling my sore arm to my broken chest. There were a few fires burning around the beach, but the camp was still. Everyone was asleep- everyone but me.

Turning my back on the dark ocean, I entered the jungle, just wanting to be away from here.

I had no idea where I was going. I walked for maybe five minutes before finding a small cliff that over-looked the beach. I sat down on the edge, crossing my legs as I stared out at the beach that'd become my home over the past month, stared at the tents and the fires, at the graveyard, at the hole that we had yet to place Shannon in.

"Wow, someone really did a number on you."

The dark-eyed immortal walked around me and knelt in front of me, scrutinizing my face as he dug around in his pack for something. I looked back at him; it was the first time I'd seen him since the day after Boone died.

"Hey, Richard."

"Hey yourself," he said, pulling on his glasses. He grasped my jaw gently, turning my head so that he could examine the bruise above my eye.

"What happened to you?"

"I got in a fight with a rock."

Man, it seemed like a lifetime ago that I'd gone out to the Black Rock.

He stared at me for a second before chuckling. "Guess I can tell who won."

"I got shot today," I told him, watching his face. Something tightened behind his eyes.

"That had to be fun."

"Yeah, I know how Elliot feels now."

He said nothing, and instead began looking at the scrape on my arm, his face intent. He wasn't fooling me.

"Why didn't you tell me he was alive?" I asked him, moving my head to look him in the face, anger and hurt in my voice.

"Would it have done any good?" he asked, still not looking at me.

" 'Done any good?' Maybe like me knowing the guy who started all this wasn't dead, yeah!"

"He didn't _want_ me to tell you," said Richard, raising his voice to cover mine. He looked at me for the first time, eyebrows raised. I stared at him, speechless, and he stared flatly back at me.

"Why the hell not?" My voice was quiet and steely. Richard sighed, shaking his head as he pulled the frames off his face.

"Don't, Katty-"

"I have a right to know. I was- _covered_ in this man's blood, I killed for him-"

"He didn't want you to know because he has someone here," said Richard flatly, raising his eyebrows more. A cold feeling flooded my stomach.

"What do you mean?"

"My brother and I… it's not often that we find someone willing to live with us, knowing we won't age and they will. Elliot didn't want you to know because he knows you, and because he knows that you'll screw up what he has."

"Does he think I'm some kind of home-wrecker or something-?" my voice rose angrily, but Richard shook his head.

"No, not at all. But you have a… tendency to say things at the wrong time, and we both now you have a hard time letting go."

"Then why did he kiss me?" I shouted, scrambling to my feet, clutching my shoulder. Richard rose with me and I glared up at him, holding my sore arm. He simply looked down at me, his eyes hidden by the night.

"Why did _you_ kiss me?" he asked, his voice a low murmur. My stomach turned to ice.

"Because I was drunk and exhausted and someone I loved had just died and I wasn't thinking straight-"

"As I recall, you got Elliot drunk that night." His face was impassive and blank, his eyes boring into me. I gritted my jaw.

"You know what, why don't you just tell him he shouldn't have bothered with me in Venice-"

"Hey," said Richard, grabbing my wrist. I turned back to look up at him. "You've already got three men on this island who would give their lives for you. Do you really need Elliot, too?"

"He made me what I am," I spat. "He taught me how to kill and he woke me up. Tell me, how do I not need him?"

"Forget about him," said Richard quietly, his voice tense, his eyes burning under his dark brows. "Forget about him and move on."

"I don't give a damn about him romantically. But he's- he's my constant. He was there before and he's still here. He's got answers, Richard, he knows me, and I wanna know how-"

"He knows you because he watched you grow up," said Richard, raising his eyebrows. His warm hand was still wrapped around my wrist. "And he was watching over you your entire life because I told him too."

"_Why_, though? There's nothing special about me-!"

"Have you heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?" he asked, and I fell silent. Pieces were starting to click into place.

"This is more time-travel stuff, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said, nodding. I thought, vigorously.

"John or James?"

"Both."

"What happened-?"

"Fifty years ago, John Locke came into our encampment, and when he saw me, all those years ago, the first thing he said was, 'She was right'." His eyes bored into mine. "I asked him who he was talking about, and he gave me this."

He let go of my wrist finally, the warm heat of his hand disappearing, and he dug something out of his back pocket- and old, folded up and spot stained picture. He handed it to me and unfolded it.

The girl in the picture was me.

I was looking at the camera, making a face, my cheeks puffed out and my eyes crossed, my hair a big puffy mess, and John was standing in the picture beside me, an arm draped over my shoulder. His face was broken in a wide, happy smile. This picture hadn't been taken yet, and I could only guess how it got printed out- maybe in New Otherton.

I looked up slowly at Richard, my jaw dropped, to find him staring down at me, his dark eyes unreadable. He nodded at the picture.

"You have no idea how much amusement that's given me, over the years."

Looking at my ridiculous face, I couldn't help the smile that cracked through the anger. "I bet."

"Twenty years later, when James and Juliet and the others were stranded in the seventies, I asked him about you."

"What did he say?" I asked quietly, and Richard chuckled.

"I told him what John had told me- not much at all. Just your name, and that you knew things." He almost said something else, but caught himself, closing his mouth before starting again. I didn't push. I could guess. "I asked him if you were special. James laughed and said, and I quote, "Dicky, she defines the damn word.'"

"So you sent Elliot to look after me," I said quietly. "The only thing special about me is that John let my name slip fifty years ago."

"And that you're from another world," he said, raising his eyebrows. "A world were all this is fiction- and now you're a part of it."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I can't answer that."

I sighed, running a hand through my hair. My chest was beginning to throb.

"You should get some sleep," said Richard, his voice quiet. "Especially if you got shot."

I nodded and handed him back the picture, a grin breaking out on my face.

"In case you need a little humor," I told him, and, for the first time since I'd met him, Richard Alpert laughed out loud.

**LOST

* * *

**

"Signal Fire" by Snow Patrol, mainly Katty and Jack, NOT ROMANTIC.

A/N: I know it's been a while, but I'm afraid it's probably going to be about three weeks before my next update cause I'm traveling out of the country and I'm not sure I'll have internet where I'll be staying. So it's gonna be a while.

Love,

Sarah.


	4. Making The Thread

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**_You are one of God's mistakes,  
You crying, tragic waste of skin,  
I'm well aware of how it aches ,  
And you still won't let me in.  
Now I'm breaking down your door,  
To try and save your swollen face ,  
Though I don't like you anymore,  
You lying, trying waste of space.._

You were mother nature's son ,  
Someone to whom I could relate ,  
Your needle and your damage done,  
Remains a sordid twist of fate.  
Now I'm trying to wake you up ,  
To pull you from the liquid sky ,  
Coz if I don't we'll both end up ,  
With just your song to say goodbye.

**Chapter Four: Making The Thread**

**Day Forty-Nine**

The weather on the day of Shannon's funeral was cruelly gorgeous, sunny and windy and a little cooler than normal. Unfortunately, I wasn't out on the island enjoying it, because, at the moment, I was sitting on the table in the hatch, my legs dangling over the side, my shirt off and my left bra strap resting on my shoulder as Jack intently cleaned the bullet wound.

I hissed, wincing, my fingers curling on the metal of the table, searching vainly for something to clench.

"Sorry," he said.

"This may come as a shock, but I've decided I don't like being shot."

He laughed as he dabbed gingerly at the small hole on the left side of my chest with rags soaked in hydrogen peroxide.

"On the plus side, the stitches look clean, and you're not bleeding anymore."

"Hallelujah."

"You can say that again."

"Are you going to the funeral?"

He hesitated, now bandaging me up, his long fingers very tender and very practiced, before his eyes flickered up to mine.

"I don't know," he said, looking back down to the ugly red hole. Another scar to add to my collection. "If Kate wants to go, I'll stay here with Sawyer."

"How's he doin', by the way?"

Jack shook his head and we both looked in the direction of Sawyer's room. "He's better than he was-"

"But that's not saying much, is it?"

"Look, Katty, why do you have to ask? Don't you just know whether or not he's gonna get better?"

I shrugged, which was a bad move. Wincing in pain, I replied, "It's one thing to know somethin's gonna happen, see it on TV. It's a whole 'nother world, however, t' live it."

He laughed, shaking his head. "Yeah, I bet it is."

"It's weird. I mean, I know what's gonna happen, but I forget the little details, cause it all looks so different when you're living it. It's not just episode names and events and characters anymore, it's your life."

"Episode names?"

"Yep."

"What was this episode named?"

"I have no idea. But the last one was Collision- I think. Dude! I remember! This episode is called 'What Kate Did'."

He stared at me.

"Creative genius, right?"

"What was your favorite episode?"

"Dude, I don't even know," I replied, my brow furrowing as I thought, staring off into space. "Whole bunch from the third season- we're in season two now, it started on day forty-six- a few from this season and loads from four and five."

I looked at him innocently, nodding, and he simply stared at me, nonplussed. I pulled my shirt on and hopped off the table.

"Katty… what is this show, the show about us, called?

I hesitated, looking at him. "It's called 'Lost'."

-

Jack and I walked down to the beach together, laughing and talking, telling each other stories, stupid things we'd done.

"- so he actually managed to convince me to get up there and sing it."

"Toxic."

"Yep," said Jack, nodding, not looking at me, a smile across his thin face.

"By Britney Spears."

He laughed. "Yeah."

"There wouldn't happen to be a recording of this event anywhere?"

"Not on the island."

"Well, darn it."

-

Everyone was solemn and quiet and sad as we approached the blanket-covered body of Shannon. My eyes strayed to the grave, just next to it, freshly dug, and I felt the stabs of pain and despair.

Sayid stepped forward, holding a flower. His hair was pulled back and his eyes were red, his dark face oddly drained. His posture was tense and defeated as he slowly approached the grave and I saw him look down inside it, slowly, warily, painfully, and I had to bit my lip to hold back a few tears. Jack stood next to me, no traces of our jokes or laughter on his somber face.

"Shannon and I were strangers," said Sayid quietly, still looking down into the grave. "We never would have met if- we wouldn't even have _spoken_ if-" He trailed off, screwing his eyes shut, and I felt an odd, painful emotion rising in my throat, making my eyes blur. I wasn't the only one who was tearing up. "But we _did_ meet and… we _did_ speak. At least... I loved her."

Too overcome to continue, he turned and strode away, every movement, every jerk of his arms saying, quite clearly, _not_ to follow him.

So I followed him.

I chased after him, ignoring the pain in my chest, my bare feet kicking up sand, trying to hurriedly wipe the tears out of my eyes.

"Sayid!"

He stopped but didn't turn around and I came to a stop next to him, panting a little, my good arm swinging by my side. He still didn't turn.

"Sayid, I… I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Shannon. I'm sorry about yesterday."

Nothing.

"I know- how it feels. Believe me. I know."

"You know?" he hissed, whirling suddenly, his eyes unbearably pain-filled and angry. "Your Boone has been dead five days and you're already laughing again, flirting, living, moving on- what could you possibly know of my grief?"

"I didn't have a choice, Sayid," I said softly, trying to keep the pain and shock out of my voice, my eyebrows pulling up as I stared up into his broken face. "I didn't have a choice. He deserved better- someone to mourn him, really mourn him- but I can't. I don't have that luxury, I gotta shake it off, like it's- like it's nothing, cause I've got things I have to do. I have to live without mourning him and that- that's the real tragedy."

He stared down at me and I looked evenly back up at him, trying not to cry.

"Believe me," I continued quietly, blinking back the stinging tears, "I miss him. More than I'da thought was possible. Every time I got to my tent and he's not there, every time I go to our lake without him, it's like a knife. It hurts, physically. I know about pain, Sayid, and I'd hoped that you wouldn't have to go through this, too."

For a second, I thought he was going to forgive me, and we'd go back to being best friends, and he'd let me help him. For just a second, there was a wavering in his black eyes.

But then his face hardened and he said, very quietly, his voice made of steel, "If only the world revolved around you and your hope."

And then, without another word, he turned and walked away, leaving me feeling worse than before.

-

"You look like shit," said Ana Lucia, raising an eyebrow and I plopped myself down next to her with a sigh.

"Yeah, fightin' with your best friend does that to you."

"The Arab?"

"I tried t' tell him that I knew how he was feelin', Boone and all, and he just… he doesn't get it," I shook my head, tracing patterns in the sand with my forefinger, staring off into the bright blue waves of the ocean.

"Guys are idiots, Ana."

She chuckled as she pulled out a mango and tossed it to me before taking one for herself and biting into it.

"You can say that again."

"I just wanna... I wanna help him, y'know? Be there for him, cause you can't do somethin' like this on your own."

"You did."

"I didn't have a choice."

At that she looked over at me, a heavy black brow quirked, mango juice running down her hand and she said, quietly, in her hoarse voice, "There's always a choice."

She finished her mango and pulled out a blunt stick and a piece of metal and began sharpening it. We said nothing, her working and me staring off into the blue sky.

It may have been minutes and it may have been hours later that Jack approached us with the intention of talking to Ana, two mini alcohol bottles in between his fingers. Ana glanced up at him and the ironic smile of hers slid across her dark features as Jack sat next to her and offered her the bottles.

"I'll see you two later," I said, rising to my feet. Ana turned and nodded at me and Jack gave me a short little wave, so I brushed the sand off the back of my pants and made my way to my tent, with every intention of getting some sleep.

-

A few hours had passed and I was deeply immersed in the fourth Harry Potter when someone kicked sand at me. I looked up, absolutely enraged, to see Sawyer standing over me, looking a little worse for wear, his hair sticking up everywhere, much paler than normal, but he was grinning, even as he clutched his arm.

"Hey, Katty."

With a squeal that would have better suited a pig, I leapt to my feet and wrapped my arms around his waist, burying my face in his chest, grinning like a lunatic. He sighed and wrapped his good arm around me.

"Missed you too, kiddo."

"You alright?" I asked him, pulled back and looking up into his beloved face. He grinned.

"Got shot."

"Me, too."

His eyes widened for a split second before narrowing dangerously and his big hand, which had run down my arm to interlace his fingers with my arm, tightened its grasp.

"You better tell me everythin' right now."

So I told him. Told him about trying to save Shannon, failing, told him about my fight with Sayid and my forming friendship with Ana, which made him narrow his eyes.

"I'm gonna kill her. I swear, I'm gonna kill 'er-"

"Don't. It's was an accident, and she feels bad enough already."

"Kat, she could be _dead_ and she wouldn't feel bad enough," he growled, turning to look at me after sweeping the beach for Ana.

"I'm alright," I said simply. "It'll heal. Now, the bastard who shot you, however- I meet him, and it's going down."

He chuckled, although the anger in his eyes had not left completely and he pulled me in tight for another one armed hug, his lips brushing my cheekbone.

"Thank god I got you lookin' out for me, midge."

-

Richard, for the first time in a very long time, felt oddly excited. There was a weird energy flowing through his ancient veins that wouldn't allow him to sleep, or even stop moving. He was pacing inside his home, one hand on his hip and the other pressing his forehead. Elliot, who was lying on the couch, groaned.

"Richard, calm down."

"Can't," replied the darker man, still pacing. Almost absentmindedly, he pulled the aged photo out of his back pocket- the photo of a kind-faced bald man and the teenager who, when she distorted her face like she was doing, bore a definite resemblance to Quasimodo.

From reflex, his eyes swept the picture, looking for something, anything- proof that these two seemingly ordinary people were what they were thought to be- extraordinary.

Katty, well, there was no doubt the girl was special. She was somehow a product of the collision of worlds, of the zipping of a fabric that should have never existed- she existed in two worlds, simultaneously, or at least she had, until the twenty-second of September, when she was somehow transferred from her world to theirs. It was odd, but not unheard of- there were odder things that had happened.

If the time-traveling John Locke hadn't mentioned her fifty years ago, it was doubtful they'd even have heard of her. But John Locke did mention her, and as such, Elliot watched her grow up.

Richard's brow furrowed as his bare feet (he'd always hated shoes) slammed against the floor as he paced. Elliot sighed.

Elliot had watched her grow up and it soon became obvious that Kathryn Ivey Sherman was not ordinary. She was quick to believe but not easy to deceive, paranoid but trusting, cold but very compassionate- and that was only scratching the surface. She'd seen things others couldn't and believed things she shouldn't. There was obviously something very special and different about her. She'd always behaved much older than her years.

Richard's pacing slowed.

Could she be-?

No. It was too fantastical, too crazy. Even for a pair of ancient men, this… it couldn't happen.

And then there was John. There had to be something very, very special about him, if his spine was healed by the island. The island sped healing and was even known to cure near-sightedness (although it had a nasty habit of causing far-sightedness), but something of this magnitude could only happen by direct involvement on Jacob's behalf. And Jacob, for the most part, didn't get involved with "ordinary" men and women. He waited, biding his time for the extraordinary- like Richard and Elliot. And, apparently, John and Katty.

"I know what you're thinking," said Elliot loudly, and Richard looked over at the younger immortal, who was fixing him in that dark stare that they both had. "About her."

"What about her?"

"She's not like us," said Elliot quietly. Richard said nothing as he dragged his eyes away from the blonde immortal lounging on his couch, and thought to himself:

_Not yet._

**LOST

* * *

**

"Song To Say Goodbye" by Placebo. Sayid and Katty

A/N: I'm back! Just got home a few hours ago, and guess who I met in London? KATTY SHERMAN. We happened to be going at the same time so we met up and hung out and it was SO COOL. It was like... meeting a fictional character. She is just like this Katty. It was amazing and really weird.

Sorry this chapter's short. The next one isn't that long either, but It's pretty darn interesting.

Love,

Sarah


	5. London Calling

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**

_You in the dark  
You in the pain  
You on the run  
Living a hell  
Living your ghost  
Living your end  
Never seem to get in the place that I belong  
Don't wanna lose the time  
Lose the time to come_

Whatever you say it's alright  
Whatever you do it's all good  
Whatever you say it's alright  
Silence is not the way  
We need to talk about it  
If heaven is on the way

**Chapter Five: London Calling**

**Two Years Previously**

There were many things Elliot would rather be doing than following a loud, boisterous and large family around London. However, that happened to be precisely what he was doing.

The mother, intent on herding her brood safely onto the train, sounded slightly stressed as the father shouted at the youngest girl to hurry. The littlest boy, a tiny, fuzzy-headed thing, was bouncing everywhere as Elliot stepped onto the Tube train. The two eldest stepped onto the train next, looking alarmingly alike, bickering good-naturedly and grinning, the boy being downright weird and the girl using cutting sarcasm along with a toothy grin.

The mother sank into a chair, looking exhausted, and the younger girl, a child who would obviously grow up to be stunningly pretty, sat next to her and immediately lay her head on her mothers arm, a wide smile on her face. They all had the same smile- wide and somewhat crooked. The little boy in the soccer jersey went to stand next to his father, whose shirt was tucked in and whose eyes, surprisingly and violently blue, just like those of his eldest children, were hidden behind dark shades.

The eldest two continued laughing at each other and Elliot smirked whilst listening to their childlike, though admittedly amusing banter.

He'd adopted so many disguises over the course of the past week and a half the family had been in London, he rather felt he deserved an Oscar. Today he'd donned an almost black wig and had darkened his skin several shades and even used a prosthetic nose, making him look distinctly Arabic. Even if they'd seen him before, he doubted they'd recognize him. There was nothing of the green eyed, fair-haired immortal in this swarthy man's face.

Although- the eldest girl had looked had him oddly this morning as they passed each other entering Finchley Station. Elliot had watched this girl grow up, and he knew the difference between the appraising look she gave a man she thought was attractive and the one she'd given him. It'd been a quiet, searching look- and it hadn't been the first one of it's kind he'd been given by this child. He'd bumped into her several times over the course of her life and especially in the past week and a half, and that's when those looks had started. Elliot didn't even think she realized it, but she knew him, in a way.

The train began moving and the family was focused on their own affairs, something that relieved Elliot, although Katty did glance his way more than once, that odd look on her face. Whether she was checking him out or making sure he wasn't armed; Elliot didn't know. It was hard to tell what this girl was thinking.

The seat next to him creaked and Elliot glanced over and knew, immediately, that this man was not from England or even Europe, and neither did he have any interest at arriving at the next station. The man looked at Elliot and gave him a coarse smile before nodding at the oblivious Katty, who was still grinning like she knew something the rest of the train didn't, her round cheeks lifted happily, no longer looking at Elliot.

"Pretty one, isn't she?"

Elliot said nothing, simply looked hard at the man, who leaned forward and whispered in his ear, "I know what you are. I know about her, the island, and your brother. Bring her by Whitechapel at midnight tonight."

Elliot said nothing, simply looked at the man, who looked back at him.

"What if I decide I don't really want to?"

The man quirked an eyebrow. "You know who I am, Alpert, and you know who I work for. If you don't bring me the girl… then he's is going to blow up Venice. So, you see, either way, she dies. But if you bring her tonight, she'll be the _only_ one who dies."

Elliot glanced over at Katty, who was now making a face at her father, sending him into gales of laughter. He knew what would await her if he complied to the requests of this man.

"Except killing won't be the only thing you do to her, will it?"

The man laughed. "Not what you're thinking of. We've got… ah, professionals for that; we don't want virgin maids that don't know what they're doing. We'll run some tests on her, of course, but she won't be treated like some experimental toy."

"And I have your word on that?"

The man's eyes glittered, but he nodded.

"My word."

"Hmm. Too bad we both know your word isn't worth anything."

The Shermans got off the train, Katty throwing Elliot one last odd glance, before she disappeared into the sea of people.

Elliot tried to stifle the odd pain in his heart by thinking about what Richard would say. He rose too, and turned back to the man once he'd reached the doors.

"It's going to take a large bomb to destroy Venice. I suggest you start looking now."

And without a backward glance, he stepped off the train and followed after his family.

-

Elliot was skulking around Whitechapel, simply waiting for the man to show his face. Katty was miles away, in her dorm, sound asleep- he'd peered in her window before coming down here.

A laughing, drunken British couple wandered past him, not even glancing at him. When Elliot or Richard went into old cities, they were hardly noticed, because, in most cases, they were older than the city surrounding them- and that, the age, somehow provided a very powerful camouflage.

There. A flicker in the light- it was him. He wasn't even trying to be subtle, his hands shoved in the pockets of his long coat, standing in the light from the lamps.

The ghosts of 1888 lingered, women who hadn't deserved their horrific fates.

The man turned, and Elliot realized that it wasn't a man at all. It was a woman, medium height, thin, with short hair and high cheekbones. Elliot's brow furrowed. Was she working for Widmore? Or someone much more sinister?

He didn't think so.

The woman turned more and, although it should have been impossible for her to see him, shrouded in darkness as he was, he saw her arched brows tighten infinitesimally before she began making her way over to him, her coat swaying around her thin thighs. Realizing there was nothing for it, Elliot straightened up and stepped out into the light, just a few feet from her. The woman didn't look remotely surprised to see him.

"Are you Elliot?"

Her accent was French.

"Yes."

"Wondered if you'd ever turn up."

He just looked at her and she sighed.

"Listen, why don't you come get a drink with me? This is going to take a bit of explaining."

And so they set off to the Ten Bells (another sting from 1888) and she told him her story, her extraordinary story, and something in her glass green eyes made it hard for Elliot not to believe her. She told him about her family history (he knew something about stakes and fire and false accusations) and how the gift had manifested itself in her, generations later. How she'd Seen him, and come to him. She knew about the island, and, somehow, Jacob.

"What's your name?" he asked her finally, slowly, searchingly, his long fingers wrapped around a tankard of ale. It was better than American, but the best liquor had been made during the Prohibition.

She looked back at him, that short, straight, wheat-blonde hair falling into her eyes, before she said, "Maggie."

-

A month passed. Then two. Then ten. A year. A year and a half, and Venice was still there. Of course, Elliot had expected it to be.

And, when he wasn't watching over Katty or spending time on the island, he was searching for answers- for starters, why Venice? What was there that Widmore wanted to hide or destroy?

And, more importantly, was it even _Widmore_ these people were working for? There were forces much larger than he and Ben battling for the island, and lately, things had begun to happen. Unsettling things; things that indicated the old wars may be on the brink of revival. And that could not spell well for the bulk of humanity.

Elliot didn't really think it was Widmore's men; he'd watched him grow from a boy to a man and though he was hard and did what was necessary, he'd never been cruel and didn't particularly like taking innocent lives, though he would if he had to.

However, Jacob's enemy- he and Richard didn't even know the man's name, and they were Jacob's closest confidants- didn't mind killing innocents. Jacob, in fact, suspected that there was a part of him which liked it.

So, the question remained… what was in Venice?

-

Two years had passed since Elliot met Maggie, and the Sherman family was again in London, and, again, Elliot was following them once more. Two weeks flew by, and then they were going home, and so was he, back to the island, back to Maggie.

Then Katty was headed out again and Ted, her father, had been made an offer he couldn't refuse to teach in London for three weeks, and they were all leaving. Elliot watched from behind a newspaper in the airport as Katty hugged her family goodbye as she left with the student ambassador program, swearing she'd meet up with her family in London.

She got on the plane, sitting awkwardly next to an attractive boy in the program who stared just a little too intently at her, and Elliot sat a few rows behind them, unable to ignore the knowledge that something was very, very wrong here.

A week passed with no problems-

And then Katty got herself lost in Venice.

He watched her wander around, clutching at the frayed straps of her bag, her eyes wide and her jaw clenched, a sign that said 'fuck-off, I'm terrified' stamped very securely on her forehead. Elliot sighed, chuckling and rolling his eyes at this girl whom he'd grown to be very fond of.

Later, he'd wonder that he hadn't caught her in the act when she was getting him drunk. It was done perfectly- very smooth and _very_ impressive.

And, under the influence of alcohol and the intoxicating feeling of danger close by in the city, she'd slowly begun to morph from a girl he considered a mixture of a sister and a best friend into something exciting, mysterious, and toxic. And when you'd lived as long as Elliot, not many things seemed mysterious. He'd been to Area Fifty-One, for Christ's sake.

But there she was, looking up at him with those round, analytical eyes and her mouth set in a firm line and he'd-

Fallen asleep. Right on top of her.

He came to a few seconds later when she murmured his name and wrapped her little fingers in his hair, and he just hadn't been able to help himself.

She tasted sweet and young, like sarcasm and roses and a girl on the verge of being a woman.

-

Pain.

Katty's shocked eyes.

Then he was falling, his eyes rolling back in his head, and, through the darkness, he felt an ancient rage wash over him, a rage that wasn't his. He heard gunshots, felt a rush of unbearable heat, and then he knew nothing.

-

"Elliot? Elliot, baby, can you hear me?"

"Richard, what is going on-"

"-when did you find him-?"

"-how long ago was the bombing-?"

"-Elliot, listen to me-"

Voices swirled around him. Familiar voices. He heard Tom, Ben, his brother/uncle, and Maggie.

"_Katty_." An old language, one that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries.

"Did he say something?"

"Move!"

There were hands on his face, not Maggie's hands or Katty's either, big hands, ancient hands, turning his head one way and then the other.

"Elliot," said the low voice of his brother, "can you hear?"

"_Katty,"_ said Elliot, more insistently, in another old tongue. He couldn't quite muster the energy to open his eyes yet. He could almost see Richard nod.

"She's fine, she's here, on the island, her plane crashed-"

"_Venice_." Yet another.

"Elliot, look at me."

Very slowly and with stupendous effort, Elliot opened his eyes. His brother's face hovered over him, and if Elliot hadn't known him as well as he did, he'd never have known just how scared Richard was at this moment. He saw the tension leave the older man's shoulders.

"How long was I out?" groaned Elliot, reverting back to modern English, sitting up with a hand on his head. He was sitting on a couch. Richard handed him a glass of water, which he drank thirstily.

"Almost two weeks. We didn't even find you until two days after the bomb went off-"

Elliot's eyes rose to see Maggie's, white face, with her jaw clenched, staring at him.

"Maggie-"

She took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was normal, if a little higher than normal. "Are you alright?"

He winced at the tenderness in his ribs. "I've been better."

Be stepped forward, fixing him in that piercing blue gaze. "What happened to the girl?"

"You know more than I do," said Elliot honestly, his voice hoarse, looking from Richard to Ben. "She should have died; we were right at the heart of the blast-"

Richard was shaking his head. "She's definitely not dead."

"Scarred?"

"Her back," said Ben with a slight jerk of his head. Richard was staring at Elliot intently.

"I met her yesterday," said Richard, his eyes unreadable. A grin spread over Elliot's face.

"What did you think?"

"She…. she's definitely odd. _There's something you need to know,"_ he added, under his breath, in a dialect that hadn't been spoken aloud by its native people for over a millennia. Elliot stared at him and Richard regarded the rest of the room.

"Can we have a minute?"

They all filed out, Maggie giving Elliot one last, searching look before the door shut behind her. Elliot immediately turned to Richard.

"_What?"_

Richard raised his eyebrows. _"There was a little boy on the plane. A little boy named Elliot."_

Elliot felt his heart drop out of his body as he thought of a baby he'd held for five seconds before he was rushed away; he though of the dark eyes and long hair of the boy's mother.

"_Is he-"_

Richard nodded silently, and Elliot's eyes widened as he sucked in air.

"_And… Jenna?"_

Richard said nothing and Elliot closed his eyes as his heart twisted.

"_Who's taking care of him now?"_ he asked, his eyes still closed. He heard Richard chuckle, a dark, ironic sound. Elliot had heard that laugh before; it usually meant the end of a civilization was coming.

"_Katty."_

**LOST

* * *

**

"Letting the Cables Sleep" by Bush

A/N: So I guess this is sorta the equivilent of 'The Other Forty-Eight Days', right? Lol. On the plus side, the next chapter's got some hot Sawyer action :). This chapter isn't particularly interesting, I know, but it's kinda important. Not as important as the next chapter, but it's not something you wanna skip over. Plus I had London on the mind, what with being there, and all, so this just kinda... came pouring out.

To answer some questions: Katty Sherman is a real person. Something I do when I'm coming up with a story but hit a block on a character is get onto sites like Facebook or Myspace and find names and sometimes faces to use. I had this story planned out, but I was kind of at a loss as to the character and how to develop her. So I got on facebook to find some cool names and one of the first ones I saw was 'Katty Sherman' and I thought, um, okay, that's a pretty cool name. And the girl was really pretty, to, in a really odd way, so I decided to base the character's looks off her as well. Took a few details from her page (she's an artist, sixteen, lives in the south, etc) and I had a character! Then a girl reviewed this story and her NAMED WAS KATTY SHERMAN ASD;SJAL;JSFADJ. I thought she was gonna be pissed but she was super excited and okay with it, and she even said that if I needed stuff for a backstory, I could basically use her past. And she's got a really interesting family and is all around an amusing and interesting person, so I figured, hey, dude, that's awesome. So that's the story!

Btw. Nestor Carbonell ships Richard/Kat(ty)e. "I wouldn't mind if Kat(ty)e ruined Richard's life."

LOLOL JUST WAIT HONEY.

Also, just so everyone knows, enjoy Katty/Saywer while it lasts. :(. They're both too stupid for it to carry on much longer. But I love Juliet, so I guess it's KIND of okay.

Love,

Sarah


	6. Blood Ties and Life Lines

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**

_If roses are meant to be red  
And violets to be blue  
Why isn't my heart meant for you_

My hands longing to touch you  
But I can barely breathe  
Starry eyes that make me melt  
Right in front of me

Lost in this world  
I even get lost in this song  
And when the lights go down  
That is where I'll be found

**Chapter Six: Blood Ties and Life Lines**

**Day Fifty**

There was a knot in my stomach, a hard tension that hadn't left me since Elliot had revealed himself. My eyes were open, staring at the sand as Sawyer slept next to me, his breathing even and deep and reassuring, his lips just inches from my neck. Both of us were clothed- but only just. He was clad in only a pair of short and I had on the shirt that he'd been wearing when he entered my tent, a shirt that wasn't quite long enough to completely cover my bright blue underwear. One of his arms draped over my waist, his breath hot on my neck and his hair brushing my bare shoulder.

This romance, relationship, whatever the hell it was, couldn't last. He was destined for Kate and Juliet- I was merely a block in the pavement on the road to better things. And, strangely enough, I was okay with that. Mostly.

He sighed and moved closer to me, his bare chest pressing against Jack's t-shirt and my scarred back, nestling his face into the curve of my neck.

I was possibly the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. Here I was, almost seventeen years old, old enough to know better, and yet still falling for men that a) were doomed to die, b) destined to be in another woman's arms, and, best of all, c) immortal. This was just dandy.

Because I couldn't deny the way Richard's face, body, the way he moved, his smile, everything, kept popping into my mind at the worst possible moments, nor could I deny the way that these flashes changed the tension in my stomach to something else entirely. Something frighteningly heavy and not entirely unpleasant. All because of one man. No one I'd ever met had had this effect on me- not Elliot, not Sawyer, or Boone, or even the men before this, my friends and unrequited adolescent loves.

I was stupid. And I was gonna pay for it, again and again, the lesson learned but ignored.

"What're ya thinkin' 'bout, Kat?"

I rolled over, ignoring the dull constant ache in my chest, to see Sawyer's bright blue eyes and smiling mouth. The sliver of sky outside the tent was black, sprinkled with brightly luminous stars.

"I'm thinking about breakfast."

He smirked at that, raising his head a little, his eyes following the line of my neck down to my chest.

"Mmm. So 'm I."

He lowered his mouth to mine and all thoughts- Richard, breakfast, even the hole in my chest- were firmly erased from my mind as Sawyer Ford claimed my mouth with his hot one, lowered his hard, heavy body on top of mine, his hair falling around my face, a hand on either side of my head.

-

The TV screen was not nearly big enough for the likes of Holly and Felicia, especially considering that their best friend, not to mention several sinfully gorgeous men, had been gracing it quite a lot recently.

The teenage duo, both of whom were stunningly pretty, very funny, and deadly loyal, had been re-watching the entire series of LOST in their quest to find out what the missing part of the trio was going through. They were not to be disappointed.

On the screen, an impassive Ben entered the dark, greenish room to encounter a sickly looking Katty with her head leaned back against the wall of the room.

"I never intended for this to happen," he said, his sharp voice quiet, his eyebrows raising. Holly and Felicia watched with bated breath as the camera flashed to a close-up of their friend's face, and Felicia's jaw dropped as they saw, with unnerving clarity, exactly how thin she'd gotten and the hollows of her cheeks.

"I'm going to kill them," growled Felicia, her ice-blue eyes flashing in a way that was very reminiscent of her friend on the TV.

"Oh my God," said Holly, unable to manage quite much more.

Exactly what Katty was going to say to Ben, however, the girls didn't find out because, at that moment, Felicia's doorbell rang.

Holly pressed the pause button as her taller friend climbed to her feet, shaking slightly, and walked over to the door. She opened it to reveal a tall, bald and thin black man. He gave her a smile that, while not unkind, had something mysterious and almost sinister about it. Felicia, normally quite loud and in-your-face, was slightly unnerved.

"Can I help you?" she asked, her voice a little sarcastic. The man's smile widened.

"Is your name Felicia Smith?"

Holly, recognizing the voice, had also climbed to her feet and came to stand next to her friend. Unlike Felicia, who had not seen past the episode they were watching now, Holly had seen the fourth season of LOST. She recognized this man. Abbadon's eyes snapped onto Holly's beautiful green ones, and his smile grew into a grin.

"Holly Wakefield."

"You," began Holly, eyes wide. "You're Abbadon."

Abbadon didn't seem remotely surprised that she knew this and simply nodded. "Indeed I am."

"Are you here to find out about Katty? 'Cause we're not gonna tell you anything about her, if that's what you want-"

"No," said Abbadon simply, raising his eyebrows. "I'm here to find out about _you_."

The two girls froze, staring at each other before they looked at each other very quickly.

"Why would you want to know about us?"

"The simple matter of what is playing on your TV in there," said Abbadon, nodding at the frozen image of Katty in the green room. "And the fact that the rest of the world has no memory of it, but that you, somehow… _do_."

They looked at each other.

"We've wondered about that, too," said Holly, looking back at Abbadon. He nodded politely at her.

"Yes, I'd think so."

"It's not just us, though," said Felicia quickly. "Katty's family remembers it too."

"Of course they do. They are her family- and she is no longer part of our world. They are torn between her and their world. And so the memory and the show remains for them."

"What the hell do you mean, she's not part of our world?" snapped Felicia. "What other world could she be a part of-?"

"I misspoke. I meant to say that she is now longer part of _your_ world." His eyes, deep and black, bore into them. "It is now _my_ world she's apart of. Why I'm here is because I am curious- very much so- how you two, ordinary girls with no blood tie, no relation at all excepting your friendship, to Miss Sherman, who is at the center of all this, remember something that should have been erased from your life completely."

"Wait," said Holly, her dark brow furrowing. "Katty's family remembers what happened because they have the same blood as her?"

Abbadon nodded. "Simply put, yes."

Holly and Felicia looked at each other and Abbadon watched them.

"You see," he continued finally, and they both looked at him, wide-eyed, "I have drawn my own conclusions as to why this is, which is the reason I have come of my own accord- my employer does not know about you two, nor do I intend him to find out- to speak to you. I have come to think, after a while… the reason you two remember what you should have forgotten is because you are destined to play a part in the outcome."

-

After struggling with the wheel to the hatch for a few minutes, I strode into the kitchen to see Jack, sound asleep, sprawled on the couch, his head tilted back and his mouth open wide. A grin spread across my face and I pulled my camera out of the pocket of Sawyer's pants and very quickly snapped a picture.

Jack'd told me I'd need to have the bandages on my chest changed once a day for at least a week, and as all the medical supplies were now in the hatch, I had to come down here for him to do it. I didn't mind; walking through the jungle was calming. It gave me time to get my thoughts in order.

Not to mention the ever present expectation that a certain dark-eyed immortal would show up. Whenever I thought about Richard, I felt like giggling like a kid with a crush.

Which was what I was.

I sat at the bar, pulling a napkin and a pen towards me, sketching Jack as I waited for him to wake up.

When the sketch on my napkin was complete, a perfect replica of the sleeping Jack Shepard, he awoke suddenly, his eyes snapping open as he sat up quickly, looking around at me. I stared back at him, the pen clutched loosely in my hands.

"Mornin', Sleepin' Beauty," I said, before I could stop myself, a grin spreading across my face. Jack blinked, looking around.

"Katty… wha-"

"Came to get fixed up," I said, gesturing loosely to my chest. He blinked again, clearly still out of it, before his gaze focused on my chest.

"Okay."

He rose to his feet and left the room, returning a minute later with bandages and antiseptic cream in his arms. I turned so that my back was facing the bar as he pulled a chair up, sitting in between my legs.

"I know this is awkward," he said, tilting his head a little, "But I need you to take your shirt off."

I did so, not embarrassed in the slightest. Jack laughed.

"Alright."

He didn't say anything as he peeled the old bandage off, cleaned the wound, and put a fresh bandage on. The wound had begun to heal, although that actually made it look worse. Jack told me that it was still clean. It didn't surprise me. I'd always been a fast healer.

"So, Katty," he said, once he was finished, as he washed his hands at the sink. "How are you?"

I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to completely unload about Elliot and Richard- put I couldn't. That subject was completely off-limits.

I gave a half shrug, grinning a little. "Apart from having a hole in my chest, I'm okay."

"Did you and Sayid get in a fight?" he asked, shrewdly, fixing my in his gray gaze as he dried his hands. My heart skipped a beat and my stomach seemed to plummet to my feet.

"Yeah."

He sat down across from me, his knees wide apart and his hands clasped between them.

"You wanna talk about it?"

I took a deep breath, fighting the urge to tell this man everything; Elliot, Richard, the future… everything.

For just a moment, I teetered on the edge of that fateful decision, and I almost went over. But then sanity returned and I shook my head a little, forcing the words back down.

"I tried t' talk to him about what happened… and I told him that Ana- that it was an accident. That he had to forgive her. And then, yesterday, after the funeral, I just wanted to be there for him, cause I've been through it too. But he… he said that I had no idea what he was feeling." My voice was almost a mumble and I refused to meet Jack's eyes, staring resolutely at the floor, my vision blurred by tears. Jack didn't say anything.

"I heard him," I said, my voice wavering and pitched higher than normal as my vision blurred even more. "I heard him tell you he wished I'd died instead of Shannon-"

My voice finally broke on the last word and the tears leaked over my cheeks as my heart twisted as I thought of Sayid- a man who had been my confidante and best friend, a man who had stabbed me in the heart.

Very quickly, Jack rose to his feet and steered me to the couch, and then I just collapsed into him, my head on his shoulder and his arms around me and I sniffed and cried.

"I've been crying on you a lot lately," I said finally, a few minutes later, rubbing my hand across my eyes and looking up at him, my eyelashes wet and my eyes red. He chuckled.

"It's what I'm here for."

"Thanks, Jack."

I let my head fall against his arm, suddenly very tired.

-

Hurley came into the hatch half an hour later, hauling a tarp full of dirty clothes, and froze when he came into the living room at the sight before him. Katty and Jack were both asleep on the couch, Katty's face pressed against Jack's side and Jack's head tilted against the back of the couch, his mouth wide open. Hurley spied the camera on the counter and, grinning, he snatched it up and took a picture of the duo.

"Dude," he said to himself, as he spied the drool on the side of Katty's mouth. "Blackmail."

-

Benjamin Linus was standing in his study with a non-descript manilla folder in his hands, open to the very first document- an information sheet of Kathryn Ivey Sherman, with a copy of the fifty-year old photo safety-clipped to the top of it. Benjamin's eyes slowly rose up the page to rest on the girl's face- her laughing, joking face. And then his eyes slowly slid over to take in the much older face of John Locke, who was grinning wildly, his arm around the teenager's shoulders like an affectionate uncle.

The page had just the basic information on Kathryn- her age, height, eye-color, weight, sex, her family and close friends, where she lived and where she went to school. The next document, though, was where things got interesting.

Ben flipped the page over and saw the first of several pages of Elliot's notes on the girl's personality and habits. The first page was from when she was three years old. Phrases jumped off the page at Ben.

"… _vivacious…"_

"… _a bit of a trouble maker…"_

"… _perceptive…"_

He flipped the page. Seven years old.

"… _very interested in animals…"_

"… _loves to be outside…."_

"… _impatient…"_

"… _intelligent…"_

Another page. Nine years.

"… _an impulsive liar…"_

Well, Ben could relate to that.

"…_very popular, but prefers books to human interaction…"_

"… _easily manipulated, but can manipulate others as well…"_

"… _doesn't cry easily…"_

Thirteen years old.

"…_outgoing…"_

"… _very pretty…"_

"… _very smart…"_

"…_stubborn…"_

Fifteen.

"… _looks seventeen or eighteen…"_

"…_has a close group of friends…"_

"… _very intelligent, but lazy in school…"_

"… _doesn't like to be touched…"_

"…_jumpy…"_

"…_slow to anger…"_

"…_icy and hard when angry…"_

"…_seems to be looking for something…"_

"Looking for what?" Ben asked himself before turning to the last page. Sixteen years old; there was a picture at the top of the page, no doubt taken when the girl was unaware. She was staring just past the camera, her eyebrows furrowed as though she was deep in thought, her pretty mouth pressed into a straight line.

"…_sarcastic…"_

"…_polite…"_

"…_hard to impress…"_

"…_a jokester…"_

"… _many friends…"_

"… _still seems to be waiting for something…"_

"Dad?"

Ben snapped the folder closed as he turned to see Alex in the doorway.

"Yes?" he asked her, a little brusquely. She nodded at the folder in his hands.

"What's that?"

"That, Alex, is the key to solving our problems," said Ben flatly, raising his eyebrows. Hers furrowed.

"What- how-?"

Ben sighed. "Alex, I know you haven't noticed, what with being so busy with Karl, and all, but things haven't been exactly normal around here lately."

She raised an eyebrow. "Dad, in case _you_ haven't noticed, things are never normal around here."

"Listen, Alex, I'm very busy-"

"Yeah, Dad, I know." Her voice was bitter. "You're always busy with something- but never me. Everything's more important than me, now-"

"You're wrong," said Ben abruptly, dropping the folder onto his desk, Kathryn Sherman forgotten. "Everything I'm doing is to keep you and everyone else here safe-"

"Keeping me away from Karl, is that keeping me safe?" she snapped, her eyes flashing. Ben said nothing for a few moments before speaking, very quietly.

"If he got you pregnant, you would die, Alex. I can't let that happen."

Alex scoffed angrily. "Get me pregnant? We're not stupid, _Ben_!"

Ben winced. "Please don't call me that."

She shook her head angrily before turning on her heel and striding out of the room. Ben looked after her for a few minutes before he heard the loud slam of her door and closed his eyes.

And then when he opened them seconds later, his face was icy and cold as he walked over to his desk and picked up the phone before punching in two numbers.

"Richard? There's something I want you to take care of."

Ben waited a second as Richard responded and then he said, his tone brusque and impatient, "Karl, Richard. I want you to take care of Karl."

-

Later that night, when her father was asleep, Alex snuck into his study and picked up the folder, still lying where Ben had slammed it onto his desk during their most recent fight. She opened it and stared at the picture of the girl and the much older man before her eyes flicked down to read the first page. Her brow furrowed as she took in all the information.

"Kathryn Sherman? Who's that?" she whispered to herself, and was very surprised when she heard a voice answer her.

"Kathryn Sherman is a girl who was destined to come here since the dawn of time," came a quiet voice behind her and she whirled around, snapping the folder shut. Richard stood behind her, his black eyes looking down at her impassively.

"You know her?" she asked him sarcastically, and his expression didn't change.

"Yes," he replied, and she scoffed, tossing her head back.

"Who is this girl? Why is my dad obsessing over her lately, and where have you and Elliot been disappearing to lately? And… what happened to Elliot? Did it have something to do with her?" She gestured down at the folder.

"It has everything to do with her," said Richard calmly, raising his eyebrows. "Elliot and I have been watching over her, and Elliot was caught in the crossfire of an attack designed to kill her," he said all this very calmly before nodding at the folder in Alex's shaking hands. She looked dawn at the picture again, at the girl who was obviously a goofball, then looked back up in Richard.

"Why is my dad so interested in her?"

For the first time, a smile flitted across Richard's face. "You'll have to ask him that."

She exhaled quickly. "Yeah, right."

"Your father loves you." He said it softly, unjudgmentally, and she looked back up at him.

"_Is_ he my father?"

He said nothing for a moment, before extending his hand. "I came to get that."

For a split second, her fingers curled around the folder and she thought about refusing. But then she remembered who this was- Richard Alpert, the man who didn't age, and, what's more, someone she liked and trusted. She didn't want to get on his bad side.

She extended her shaking hand and he took the folder from her gently, as she didn't miss the way his eyes lingered on the face of the girl, nor the way his lips curved up, only slightly, as though he was amused.

"Goodnight, Alex," he said politely, nodding at her. He'd turned and reached the door by the time she called, somewhat shaken, "Night… Richard."

She watched through the window as he walked back to his house, still immersed by something in the folder.

Ignoring the quiet pangs of jealousy (she'd had a crush on Richard for as long as she could remember) she turned and made her way to her bedroom, and she stared up at the constellations on her ceiling for a long time before sleep finally claimed her.

-

**Day Fifty-One**

For the first week and a half of our lives on the island, I'd shared a tent with the kid, although, back then, we slept with a respectable distance between us, sharing a tent just 'cause it was more convenient.

Now, though, there was absolutely no distance between us. She had her pretty golden head resting on my chest and my hand was wrapped around her shoulders. She was pretending to be asleep, but I knew she wasn't.

"When're ya gonna tell me wha's wrong, Katty?" I murmured, turning my head to see her better. Her long lashes swept her cheeks and she angled her neck to look up into my face, an oddly drained look in those eyes o' hers.

"I can't," she said quietly. "I can't tell you. Wish I could, though."

"Bein' wiv' a girl who knows more about your future than you do is pretty damn weird," I remarked, smirking a little. She grinned.

"So is bein' wiv' a guy twice your age and you know more about 'im than 'e does," she retorted, and I chuckled, moving my hands to rest in her hair.

"Touché, midge."

She let her head fall back down onto my chest, her cheek pressed against my T-shirt. "Sometimes I wish I didn't know."

"Yeah," I snarked. "I bet."

We didn't say anything for a few minutes and I looked down at her. It was almost one in the morning, and she was still just staring off into space, no emotion at all on her pretty lil' face. She was just… blank.

"Wha' happened, Katie?" I murmured, reaching across my chest to stroke her jaw line. "What's makin' you so quiet?"

Her jaw worked and her brow furrowed, as though she was struggling internally with something.

"Did I ever tell you," she began slowly, turning onto her stomach so that she was gazing up at me, "how I got the scars on m' back?"

The only way I could tell how tired she was was the way she was slurrin' all her words. The kid had a vocabulary like someone from the 20th century and proper dictation t' go with it, thank-you-very-much. Except for when she was tired.

She was gazing up at me, waiting for me to answer.

"No," I said, finally. "Y' never wanted to tell me, Midge."

'Course, that wasn't entirely true, and we both knew it.

"_You wanna know what happened to me, Sawyer?"_

She said nothing to this, didn't call my buff. She didn't need to. The words echoed in the silence of the tent she used to share with Boone, clear as if we'd just spoken them.

"_Put your shirt back on, kid."_

"You gonna tell me?"

She sighed through her nose, pressing her cold cheek against my chest, on top of her tiny hand.

"I was in Venice. A last minute addition for a student ambassador program-"

I couldn't help but bark with quiet laughter and she looked up at me. "You? An ambassador? No offence, darlin', but you'd be the one t' start world war three-"

That wide, bright smile broke out on her face. "Tha's 'zactly what I said."

"Anyway. _Cooon_tinue."

She smiled again. "We went a coupla places, but my last stop was Venice, cause my dad was teachin' in London and the rest of my family was there, and they were flyin' back t' the States in five days, so I was gonna go up t' London then.

"We'd been in Venice maybe two days, an' I got lost in the city."

I chuckled again, but this time, she didn't laugh with me. She was still looking up at me, her eyes focused but _off_, somehow.

"This guy came up to me an' offered t' help me get back t' the hotel- he was really nice and American, so I trusted him." There was a slight note of ironic bitterness in her voice. "Soon enough, I realized he was leadin' me the wrong way."

"Least you were smart enough to call him on it," I growled, anger and possessiveness curling around my stomach. She chuckled.

"Yeah. I called him on it, an' he told me people in the city were tryin' t' kill me. So we went back to his apartment-"

"-_what_?!"

"- and he told me I was 'special', I called him Hagrid, then I got him drunk by playing 'I Never' and managed to weasel some answers out of him."

The smile she gave me this time was genuinely amused.

"Oh-_ho_, so that's whatcha meant when ya said you'd played I Never before t' get someone drunk t' get some answers!" I crowed, grinning down at her. "An' I jus' thought you were trying to impress me! Wayta go, Amarilla Slim."

"Glad it makes you that happy," she said, amused.

"Yeah, yeah. What happened next?"

"He kissed me," she said, matter-of-factly, and I froze, suddenly furious again. "Next day, we got up a' th' crack of dawn so tha' he could get me outta Venice. We ran into some problems. We were almost wherever he was takin' me when these guys in masks cornered us. Elliot slipped me a note and they killed 'im- least, I thought they did."

All this was said very calmly, but I knew 'er well enough to see that she didn't like this part of the story, not one bit.

"I killed them. All three of 'em. Then… then the bomb went off."

She took a deep breath. "That, James, is how I got th' scars."

"What did that letter say?"

I definitely saw the way she looked away from me and the way her hand clenched, very quickly, and I sighed.

"Lemme guess-"

"He'd written it before he actually met me," she said suddenly. "It said basically what he'd already told me- that I wasn't normal, and that people there were tryin' to kill me. And it said to find someone, when I got here."

There was a pause.

"Didja?" I asked, finally. "Didja find him?"

"No," she said, and there was definitely a faraway look in her eyes now, like she was remembering some old joke. "No, he found me."

"And… is that what's got ya all shook up?"

"No." She shook her head. "James, you gotta swear to me that if I tell you this, a, it stays between us, and b, you can't do anything about it. Ever."

"Alright, honey," I said, my brow furrowed, perplexed. "Anythin'."

She sat up, her bare legs crossed under my t-shirt, her eyes wide and her mouth open slightly.

"Elliot's alive," she said, her brow furrowing. "And… he's on the island."

"…"

"James?"

"…he's_ WHAT_?!"

**LOST

* * *

**

"Lost**" **by Anouk (Katty's feeling's about Sawyer)

A/N: This chapter was just a lot of fun to right. And that song A;JUASFH;SDJFSDHSADJHFSDA; Tell me it's not perfect for them. Omg. Srsly. Lol. Lmao. wtf. Okay. Enough of that. School starts tomorrow you guys and although I am super freaking excited cause I love school, that means updates will probably be a little slower :/ So if it's a little while before the next update, you'll know why. In no shape form or fashion am I abondoning this story. I want to try and get it finished before Christmas.

To reply to a few reviews, just cause it's fun:

_Unidentified Pinapples: _Yes, Elliot has seen Area 51. :) Man gets around. You aren't really supposed to LIKE him, not yet, anyway, he's supposed to feel a little off. I know, I don't want Sawyer/Katty to go away, either. Nestor said the Richard/Kate thing at an interview for comic con and it made me laugh my butt off and now I want to write it. Oddly enough, Katty/Jack is starting to grow on me too.

Well, one review. I'll reply if there's a question.

Love,

Sarah


	7. Glimpses of Perfection

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**_Time, is going by, so much faster than I  
And I'm starting to regret not spending all of here with you  
Now I'm wondering why I've kept this bottled inside  
So I'm starting to regret not selling all of it to you  
So if I haven't yet, I've gotta let you know_

You're never gonna be alone from this moment on  
If you ever feel like letting go, I won't let you fall  
You're never gonna be alone, I'll hold you 'til the hurt is gone

**Chapter Seven: Glimpses of Perfection**

The next thing I knew, Sawyer was climbing to his feet, a very, very angry look on his face. I grabbed his arm and he actually dragged me forwards a few inches through the sand, the muscles in his back taut.

"James! What the heck are ya doing?"

"I'm gonna make sure he dies this time," he growled, looking down at me, very angry.

"No- Sawyer!"

He'd jerked out of my grasp and had strode out of the tent. Swearing, I clambered to my feet and stumbled after him, tripping and sliding in the sand as I pushed the tent flap out of the way to see him making for the jungle. My heart stopped. I would bet any amount of money that Richard was in there, and if Sawyer met him, I didn't want to think about what would happen. I ran after him, grabbing his arm. He turned to look down at me.

"Sawyer, look, don't, alright? It'll all be okay-"

He was glowering down at me and I sighed. "Dude, it'll do more harm than good if you go barging into the jungle at night-"

"Why? Someone out there?" He turned back to the jungle. I said nothing, just stared around at the trees with wide eyes, hoping that Richard or Elliot would realize that I did not want them to reveal themselves.

-

Elliot glanced at Richard. "Should we help her out?"

But Richard was shaking with silent laughter, and could only shake his head. Elliot stared at him.

"When did you get a personality transplant?"

Still trying to repress laughter, Richard merely pointed at Katty, whose eyes might have rivaled Bambi's at that moment. They could feel the panic rolling off of her in waves, and Elliot did admit that it was rather funny how Ford towered almost a foot over her.

-

"Katty? Is there someone out there?" Sawyer was staring down at me. I winced, looking at him out of the corner of my eye, grimacing, leaning away from him apprehensively.

"Um… maybe?"

-

"Damn kid," swore Elliot as Ford's face tightened and he whirled his head to stare at the jungle. "She's gonna get us- well, not _killed_, exactly."

Richard had gained control of himself, but he was still grinning. Elliot wasn't used to seeing him this… light-hearted. Normally he, Elliot, was the one who couldn't stay focused.

"Give her some credit," Richard said. "Looks like she's got it under control."

-

"James, I've got it under control," I said frantically, and he whipped his head around to stare incredulously at me.

"Kat, ya' jus' told me ya got somma the goddamn _Others _talin' ya, and you think you got it under control?"

"…yeah?"

He blinked down at me, before shaking his head, a reluctant grin spreading over his face. "You are something new, kiddo."

"Like you can talk- mmf."

Without warning, he bent down and kissed me, his big, rough hands cupping my face. My brain spluttered and died, before I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him back, completely forgetting about the fact that Richard or Elliot may very well be watching.

-

Elliot blinked. Richard's eyes narrowed.

"She didn't do that with me," they said in unison. Then they turned to each other and said, their brows furrowing, _"What?"_

-

**Day Fifty-Two**

There is nothing quite like waking up in the arms of a fictional character. Sawyer- and Boone before him- had slept with me wrapped in their arms, held close to their chests, and whenever I woke up, it never ceased to hit me like a ton of bricks- this isn't supposed to be real. _He_ isn't supposed to be real.

But James was very real. His arm, draped over my stomach, was warm and heavy, and his other arm was angled over our heads. My back was pressed against his shirtless chest and his face was buried in the nape of my neck, his breathing even and soft. I was warm, wrapped in the arms of a man who wasn't supposed to be real.

Sawyer. Man, my best friends and I used to drool over him, squeal and shriek whenever he came out on the screen shirtless, wanted to claw Kate's eyes out whenever she kissed him- and now, here I was. Lying in his arms. Funny, the places life will take you.

I turned in his arms so that I was facing him and nestled under his chin, a grin on my face as I closed my eyes and slowly drifted back off into sleep, Sawyer's even, quiet breathing and the crashing of the waves the only lullaby I wanted.

-

"You, my darlin', are a raving beauty," came Sawyer's amused voice out of the haze of sleep. I merely groaned and rubbed my face on my arm before blinking up at him.

"Lemme sleep."

"It's almost noon, love. Time ta get up."

"No fanks."

I'd closed my eyes and was almost back asleep when the bastard poked me in the side. I twitched violently with a squeak and opened my eyes to glare at him. He was grinning widely, his bright blue eyes delighted.

"Don't," I growled, and he laughed.

"Oooh, whatcha gonna do?"

I merely looked at him before closing my eyes once more, and then the next thing I knew, Sawyer was lying across my stomach.

"Ooof!"

He began squeezing my sides, laughing the entire time and I started spazzing, grinning involuntarily, laughing at him.

"Knock it off, c'mon, Sawyer-"

I grabbed his side and he twisted away from me, still laughing.

"Midge," he said, in what was supposed to be a warning tone, although the fact that he could barely speak for laughter made it somewhat less threatening, "don't cha even think about it-"

"Oh, like that stopped you!"

Before either of us knew it, we'd gone from poking each other to-

"HIGH SCORE!" I crowed triumphantly, on my knees, as I whacked him upside the head with the pillow.

He gave me a very dangerous look. "Oh, Midge, you are gonna pay for that."

"And I'm sure I'll enjoy it immensely."

He grabbed the other pillow and launched himself at me. I dived out of the way, laughing hysterically.

"Oooh, missed me, whatcha gonna do now, loser- oof!"

With a muffled "thwack", the pillow came into contact with my stomach, knocking the air out of me and sending me sprawling on the sand. He doubled over, laughing hysterically with his arms wrapped around his middle. I glowered at him and I sat upright.

"It is ON, cowboy."

"Try and get me, midge-"

I reached into my bag and grabbed and sharpie. He raised his eyebrows, grinning.

"I'm terrified- oof! Get offa me, ya crazy hobbit!"

For I had thrown myself across the tent and knocked him flat on his back and was now sitting on his stomach, trying to draw on his face. The smiley face I'd just scribbled on his chest looked like it'd been drawn by a blind epileptic.

"Dammit, Katty, gerroffme!"

"Never! Stop moving, darnit!"

I attacked his face with the sharpie, first giving him a lightening bolt on his forehead, and that was all I managed because he bucked, throwing me off onto the sand, where I lay, laughing so hard I cried, slamming my fists into the ground. Sawyer glared at me.

"Glad you find this so amusing."

"Hey," I wheezed, sitting up, tears leaking out of my eyes and I tried to regain control of my lungs. "You started it."

He still glared at me, and with the lightening bolt on his forehead and the smiley face on his chest also staring at me, I completely lost control once again.

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, shorty."

"Alright, Harry Potter."

He pulled a shirt on (darn) and I sat up, crawling over to my own suitcase and pulling out a pair of jean shorts. I rose to my feet and pulled them on, hopping around the tent as I did so. Sawyer stared at me.

"Problems?"

"Our tent looks like it got hit by a tornado," I remarked. It did. The sand was uneven and our blankets were all twisted from our fight. I was still out of breath and his hair was sticking up in some amazing direction. We grinned at each other suddenly.

"Wonder how many people are standin' outside the tent-"

"-thinking we just had the best freaking sex ever?" I finished, grinning widely. He shrugged, stepping towards me, and I felt a familiar heat curling around my stomach.

"Might as well give 'em a bit o' what they want."

Normally, Sawyer was the one who instigated our kisses. This time, however, I gave him a very wide smile and closed the distance between us quickly, reaching up and pulling his face down to mine, kissing him, hard, on his full and still open lips.

He tasted like salt.

He pulled away seconds later, staring at me, something dark in his eyes. I just grinned back up at him, slightly breathless.

"I love you," he said, suddenly, and he immediately gritted his jaw, as though the words had escaped without ever once going through his brain for permission.

My heart stopped. And, stupidly, completely knowing that it was just going to hurt us more, I smiled and said, "The feeling's mutual, darlin'."

Then I kissed him again.

We walked out of the tent a few minutes later, side by side, grinning stupidly. We weren't holding hands- neither of us was big on PDA and, although everyone knew we were together, we didn't feel that anyone needed anymore ammunition, as it were.

We were on shift at the hatch so, still grinning like idiots, we entered the jungle. My eyes met Sayid's, just briefly, and his eyes tightened ever so slightly.

Laughing, I turned back to Sawyer and grinned up at him.

_How's that for pain, Sayid?_

-

Being with Sawyer was… perfect. We were both enormous goofballs at heart (I shrieked loudly and he fell laughing against a tree after he sprang out at me and nearly gave me a heart attack), we were both total geeks when it came to books (he'd taken my now out of use glasses because they were "damn near his prescription"), and, most importantly, we were the same. We looked uncannily alike, with blonde hair, black eyebrows and piercing blue eyes, we were both sarcastic and used nicknames far too often, we were both murderers torn over what we had done, and we had the same ice in our souls. In a lot of ways, it seemed like we were made for each other.

But we weren't. He didn't know that, but I did. Only too well.

"Can I have a piggy back ride?" I asked him suddenly and he stopped in his tracks and stared at me.

"This is cause I scared ya, ain't it?"

"Hey, what are you saying?"

He sighed, rolling his eyes although a grin was spreading over his face as he turned so that his back was to me.

"Alright."

I made a running jump and slid down his back, laughing.

"Jump higher, ya hobbit."

I made it this time, wrapping my legs around his waist and clutching around his neck.

"Can't breathe, dwarf."

I loosened my grip and ruffled his hair with one hand. "You are amazing, James."

"So I've heard," he chuckled, his cheek lifting in a grin. I kicked his thigh with my heel.

"Ow! Hey!"

"Oh, I barely kicked you. Man up, jeez-"

He dumped me to the ground and stood towering over me with his hands on his hips and a dangerous grin on his feet. "Alright, my turn."

"What?" I asked, climbing to my feet.

"You're gonna give me a ride this time."

"As much as I'd like to let you ride me, James, it's not happening."

Without warning, there was an enormous cackling weight on my back. I let out an "oof" as my legs buckled underneath my and fell to the ground with Sawyer on top of me.

"Mmm," he said, smirking. "Now, this I like."

"You may like it, but your elbow is on my freaking bladder and if you don't move it this is not going to be pretty-"

"What the hell is going on?"

Sawyer turned his head sharply and I craned my neck to see Jack and Locke, the latter of whom was looking quite amused, the former, more than a little pissed.

"Doc!" exclaimed Sawyer, leaping to his feet and giving Jack a smart salute. "What brings you here?"

I climbed to my feet and Jack gave me a long look.

Yeah, like the quadrangle needed to be more screwed up than it already was.

"We're going back to the beach," he said, gesturing to Locke, who still looked highly amused. "What are you two doing?"

"We're on button duty," said Sawyer, putting an arm around my shoulders. Jack's eyes went to me again and I gave him a grin.

"That alright?" continued Sawyer. "Can we pass, Gandalf?"

I gave a bark of laughter.

Arm still around my shoulders, we walked past the two of them, deeper into the jungle that felt like home.

-

"Air conditioning!" we cried in unison upon entering the hatch. My eyes fell on the table and I had a sudden, vivid image of myself, lying shirtless and bloody on top of it.

Then I looked to the armory, and a wide and rather stupid grin spread over my face. Just a few more days and Benjamin Linus would be in there, a fact which made me ridiculously excited. There was a scratching noise and I looked around to see Sawyer bent over the record player. He straightened up seconds later with a smile on his face, and some low-key catchy music began to play.

"Who's this?" I asked as he sauntered over to me, a smirk on his face.

"Geronimo Jackson," he said. "Whoever the hell that is."

"Good music."

" 'D like to second that."

He bent down to kiss me, more gently than normal.

I melted.

-

Sawyer slept, sprawled on the couch, and I slipped off to take a shower. Once I was clean, smelling floral and quite good, if I do say so myself, I wandered over to the couch and curled up on top of him. He was sound asleep, but his arm curled around my shoulders as I lay my wet head on his chest, drifting off to sleep, warm and comfortable and clean and safe.

-

The beeping of the alarm to the computer awoke us. Sawyer sat bolt upright, sending me tumbling off the couch in a heap. I lay on the floor for a few seconds, not sure what the hell had happened. Sawyer stared down at me and this burst into laughter.

"I have no clue what just happened," I said honestly, and he rose to his feet, extending a hand to me. I grasped it and pulled myself up and we made our way into the computer room.

"Isn't that a permanent state o' mind fer you, midge?"

I poked him in the side as he sat down to the computer and began to type in the numbers. "Hey, watch it! I'm so close to beating Mario."

"… you, my friend, are a nerd."

"Oh, that's rich, coming from the girl who reads Jurassic Park!"

"It's a good book!"

"Hell, I know, it's just not the kinda thing I'd expect you t' enjoy…"

He finished entering the numbers and the alarm flipped back up to 108. We both looked at it before he turned his gaze to me and jabbed a thumb at the clock.

"That real?"

"Obviously, retard."

"You know what I mean."

"… yeah. It's real."

He shrugged, a grin spreading over his face. " 'S good enough for me."

-

We spent the day sleeping, goofing off, and pushing the button. Mostly sleeping. Whenever we'd wake up, it'd take us a while to get into the computer room to punch the button because we'd 'fight' with each other, laughing and panting, trying to get the upper hand. These 'fights' normally ended with me clinging to Sawyer's back as he tried to get me off of him. "Like a damn leech," he'd laughingly described me.

It was evening by the time we exited the hatch and headed back home. Sawyer had an arm slung casually around my shoulders, and that was a testament to how much he liked me because he'd told me in the hatch how much he hated PDA. Of course, we were alone in the jungle, but still.

We were almost at the beach when I saw Richard. He nodded at me, and I told Sawyer I needed to use the bathroom, to go on. He made fun of me, kissed me, and left the jungle, his strut even cockier than normal. I turned to Richard, a silly, stupid smile on my face thanks to Sawyer.

He said nothing, which was unusual. I felt slightly awkward; this kiss that never should have happened seemed to grow a personality of itself and proceeded to sit between us, making loud noises and generally drawing attention to itself.

"What's up?" I said finally.

His brows furrowed infinitesimally, but he still said nothing. I glanced behind me to make sure we were alone.

"What are you doing here, Richard?"

"I wanted to see you," he said simply, and my heart began doing backflips. "And I needed to ask you something."

Confessions of undying love and other various cheesy romantic situations ran through my mind as I fought to keep my face blank.

"Ask away."

"How much have you told Ford?"

My heart fell but I kept my face neutral and shrugged. "Nothing."

"Don't lie. I saw you two, last night. You told him about Elliot, didn't you?"

I stared up at him, but his face was guarded. So guarded that it didn't look guarded; although, granted, he'd had several thousands of years to perfect the technique, whereas I'd had sixteen.

"Okay, yeah, I did," I said finally, and then continued, very quickly, before he could get a word in, "but I had to tell him. It was killing me, and I had to get it out-"

"Is he going to cause problems?"

I stared at him. Something seemed off. "No. Never… he wouldn't want to, uh, get me in trouble, or anything…"

For a second, Richard looked like he wanted to say something. But then he simply nodded and turned to disappear into the jungle. For some completely insane reason, I reached out and gently grabbed his arm. He turned back to me, a kind of detached surprise in those black eyes.

"Is… is everything alright?" I asked him quickly, turning red. "You seem kinda… off."

He stared at me, long and hard. "You're an odd girl."

"It's been mentioned. And you're changin' the subject."

"There's going to be a man, coming here. Soon."

"I know," I said, nodding. "Ben."

He stared at me.

"Richard, you already knew I know everything. But… don't tell Ben."

After a moment, he nodded. "Alright."

I was still holding his arm.

"So," he said, the darkness in his eyes lifting just slightly, "you and Ford?"

"Yep."

"Is this one going to die?"

My heart lurched. "Not that I know of."

"But it won't work, anyway."

He could read me way too well. I finally let go of his arm, shrugging. "No, it won't."

"Why would you do that?" he asked softly. "Fall for someone you could never completely give yourself to?"

"Dude, it's not like I can help it."

He raised his eyebrows slightly. "You could try."

Or faces were definitely getting closer, the tension intensifying. My heart was pounding in my ears and I felt like a whore. For however brief a time, I was _with_ Sawyer.

Our lips were less than an inch away when I heard James calling my name. In a flash, Richard was several feet away from me. He gave me a nod, said, "Be watching for Benjamin," and then he was gone, disappearing into the jungle just as James appeared at my side. He looked down at me.

"You weren't usin' the bathroom at all, were ya, Katie?"

His voice wasn't accusing. Quiet, resigned, and a little sad, but not accusing.

"No," I said. "I wasn't."

-

"You _told_ her?"

Richard shrugged as the shorter man stared angrily at him. "She won't tell anyone, Ben."

"Do you have any idea what you've risked-" Ben's voice was rising in anger, but Richard's eyes flashed to him suddenly and he trailed off, meeting the ancient man's black gaze. Richard wasn't a particularly tall man, maybe 5'10, but there was something about him that just felt wrong. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was fixing Benjamin in a very dark, very irritated glare.

Ben didn't accuse him of ignorance again.

"This girl," he said, minutes later, widening his eyes slightly. "Is she worth it?"

"Worth what?" asked Richard, very quietly. Ben shrugged.

"Worth all the time. You've been spending almost all of your time down at the beach since the crash just… just watching her. Is it worth it?"

There was a long and silent moment before Richard replied. "Don't play your games with me, Benjamin Linus. They won't work."

He'd turned on his heel and had almost reached the door when Ben called, "Sorry. Just have to wonder, you know. Almost seemed like you're emotionally invested in her."

At this, Richard turned and stared at him. Ben looked unblinkingly back; he was one of the few people who could meet Richard's eyes for more than seconds at a time.

"But then," he said, raising his eyebrows. "That'd just be ridiculous, wouldn't it? You don't _get_ emotionally invested. You don't get _involved_, do you, Richard?"

Richard looked at him for a moment later, Katty's crooked grin swimming behind his eyes.

"No," he said. "I don't."

With that, he opened Ben's door and strode out of the house and into the jungle, his heart pounding hard, his arms swinging at his sides.

_You don't get involved, do you, Richard?_

Not normally.

But this time, he hadn't been able to help himself.

**LOST

* * *

**

"Never Gonna be Alone" by Nickleback, Sawyer.

A/N: Ah, fluff. How I love it. School has started and so this story is now going to be taking the backseat. Just accept that updates will be slower.

This chapter was a lot of fun to write. It was really light-hearted and just good, silly, adorable fun. I love having Sawyer and Katty play off of each other. Also, I am seeing a new favorite in reviewers: Katty/Jack. It's not gonna happen :). At least not on the island. There may be some kind of 'encounter' later, post oceanic six, but don't count on it. I have pretty much decided what the final relationship is going to be. If you haven't noticed, the different seasons have been different "men", if you will. First season was Boone. This one is, obviously, Sawyer. But you may have noticed something else... with the end of last season, the Boone/Katty stuff was officially drawn to a close. Does she still miss him? Of course. Will he still be featured? Duh. But remember- the end of a season marks the end of a relationship. It's kind of a way of clearing the board.

GAME TIME! In which seasons do you think the men in Katty's life will star? (which men is up to you- the seasons are season 2-6 and there can be more than one man per season, but no more than two) Whoever guesses the closest gets and VERY important cameo (as yourself, not a character, so I'm afraid you have to be female) in the backstory of a VERY important character, who is not Elliot Alpert, Locke, or Jack, or a boar, or smokey. I'm not going to tell you who the cameo is with. If you win, I'll send you a message, and you need to send me one back with basic information. Nothing stalkery, just your basic looks and personality. It'll all be in the message. :)

TRUST ME. YOU'RE GONNA WANT THIS CAMEO.

Love,

Sarah.


	8. Pinpricks

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**_'Help me out' said the eagle to the dove_

_'I've fallen from my nest so high above  
Help me fly  
I am too afraid try  
Now saddled with a fear of heights  
I'm praying you can set me right'_

Please, I know that we're different  
We were one cell in the sea in the beginning  
And what we're made of was all the same once  
We're not that different after all

We are tied in history  
Connected like a family

**Chapter Eight: Pinpricks**

That night wasn't much fun. We all sat around the fire and ate, like normal, but the company was not cheerful. Claire was pale and red-eyed and Charlie kept glancing at her forlornly. I'd forgotten, but today was when they had their fight.

Another unhappy player was Kate. She hadn't said anything to me, but she sat as far away from Sawyer and I as possible and I'd glance up every now and then to see her looking accusingly at me as Jack stared at her. Sayid ate far away, away from everyone else. So did Ana.

Sawyer, if he noticed something was off with everyone, said nothing. He talked to me like everything was normal, being snarky and sarcastic and absolutely hysterical, calling me "pillows" as well as mangos and now, instead of midge, or at least as frequently, "hobbit".

It was really hard to care about everyone else's problems when he nudged me in the side, flashing his dimples at me like that.

We were heading back to our tent, pushing each other and trying to trip each other, when I heard Kate's voice behind me.

"Katty?"

We both turned around and Sawyer stared at her for a minute before giving her a grin. "Hey, freckles. Come to join the party?"

She glanced at him, then looked back to me. My stomach turned cold. I knew what was coming. The girl-fight every female dreaded- _"You knew I liked him!"_

"I wanted to talk to you," she said, looking at me, her voice flat. I nodded.

"Okay."

Sawyer glanced down at me and I grinned at him before punching him in the stomach and then scurrying away. He gave me a look that said, quite plainly, "we'll finish this later", and then he ducked inside the tent. I turned to Kate.

She had such a betrayed look on her face that I immediately felt like shit and also remembered exactly why Kate and I had disliked each other at the beginning- the man sniggering in the tent behind me.

"I can't believe you," she said flatly. I winced.

"Kate-"

"Everything you told me about just waiting, because the good would come?" She scoffed, an angry smile on her face. "Was it all just bullshit?"

"No! Listen, I've been telling you the truth-"

"You knew," she hissed, stepping forwards, "how I feel about him. You knew, and you went behind my back and-" she gestured to the tent. "Now you're sleeping with him!"

"Actually, I'm not." I said this very quickly, my voice a little panicked. Angry women scared me, and I was an angry woman very often myself. "Well, technically I am, but we're not doing each other or anything-"

"You are full of shit-"

"Will you shut up and let me finish?"

Glaring at me, she crossed her arms over her chest. I always talked with my hands and now they were held out in front of me, spread apart. I took a deep breath and glanced at the tent behind me.

"Everything is temporary for me, Kate. I love Sawyer, so much, but it… it can't work, not any more than me 'n Boone would've." I said this very quietly so Sawyer wouldn't hear. Kate's brows furrowed. "He's not meant for me, Kate."

She was silent for a minute.

"Then who is he meant for?" she asked finally, and Juliet's face flashed in my mind, her bright blue eyes and blonde hair and her smirk. All the similarities between us. Blonde hair, blue eyes, cold and compassionate, the smirk, the sarcasm… everything.

I just looked at Kate and said nothing.

-

**Day Fifty-Two**

I woke up before Sawyer the next morning, early, and slipped out of his arms and then out of the tent.

I found myself sitting on the beach, yet again, the water lapping at my bare feet as I stared into the pink and blue and yellow sunrise, the cool breeze of the relatively cool morning blowing my messy hair around my face. It was nice to just think. Just to get my thoughts in order.

Sawyer and I couldn't last much longer, I knew. I was resigned to that and yeah, it hurt, but it wasn't gonna break my heart or anything. I was a big girl and Sawyer was a man. We could take it. We had to.

"You're up early." Ana lowered herself next to me and looked over at me. "Normally you're with the redneck till about noon."

I didn't say anything and she just looked at me. "You two having problems?"

"No," I said quickly, and she raised an eyebrow. "I mean, yeah, but… not those kind of problems."

"Ah," she nodded, a small smile spreading over her face. "The kind of problem when you know what he's supposed to do and it doesn't involve you."

I glanced at her very quickly, but she didn't appear to be making fun of me. I nodded.

"That sounds 'bout right."

"You want my advice?"

"Sure."

"Love 'im while you can."

She raised her eyebrows as she said this and I felt my own pulling up in the middle. She sighed and looked out to the ocean.

"Y'know," she said, after a minute, "we're a lot alike."

"You're tellin' me," I said quietly, and she chuckled.

"Yeah, we're a lot alike. We scare people. And the people we don't scare, we intimidate, 'cause we're not normal, Katty. It's not often you'll find someone willing to live with you, being what you are, knowing what you do."

I met her flat black eyes and she drew in a breath. "Don't give up the people you could love because of what you think is supposed to happen. Nothing is set in stone."

-

An hour or so later I was filling up my water bottle at the tarp that we'd made when Claire approached me, bouncing Aaron in her arms. I looked up at her and grinned, my hand submerged in the cool water.

"Hey," I said to her. "What's up?"

She looked determined. "Is Charlie on drugs?"

My brow furrowed and my jaw dropped. "Uh, say what now?"

"Please don't play stupid with me, Katty. I want to know if he's on drugs or not because if I'm going to let me around my baby-" he voice was rising furiously. I raised my hands placating.

"Whoa, Claire, listen. If I could help, I would, but not everything is explained."

She just looked at me.

"It's like real life, Claire. Every question isn't answered. There's a whole lotta mysteries, even for me-"

"Do _you_ think he's on drugs?" Her eyebrows pulled up and she bounced Aaron, who looked up at me curiously. I closed my mouth and looked at her.

"I don't know. I think there's some pretty convincing evidence on both sides…"

She shook her head, strands of blonde falling out of her low pony tail. I reached out and grabbed her shoulder.

"Listen, if there's anything else I can help you with-"

"Yeah." She looked up, her eyes bright. "The statue. Did he know- what was inside?"

I hesitated and she sighed, her brows furrowing. "Katty, please. I have to know."

"Yes," I said quickly, and her face became steely. "He knew. Sayid told him- but Sayid didn't know that Charlie was an' addict when he told 'im."

She nodded, her eyes steely. There was an incredible amount of Jack in her face when she looked like this. I wanted to tell her that her brother was on the island, but I couldn't.

"Thank you, Katty."

"Anytime, girl," I said, grinning, punching her lightly on her shoulder and she laughed.

I headed back to the tent where Sawyer was sprawled, flat on his back, his mouth open. I grinned and took out my water bottle, approaching him silently.

-

Five seconds later, a resounding roar echoed around the camp. Rose and Bernard looked up.

"What the hell was that?" asked Bernard, perplexed. Rose just shook her head as they heard a second shout, and were able to distinguish words in this one.

"HOBBBIIIITTTTT!"

-

"I didn't do it!" I cackled as I flew out of the tent, my feet pounding the sand as a now soaking wet Sawyer charged after me. "It wasn't me, I swear!"

"Oh, you are so dead!"

He pinned me to the sand with a spectacular flying tackle. The wind was knocked out of me and I gazed up at him worriedly, grinning guiltily. His hands were clamped around my wrists.

"I love you!" I said, my voice a little panicked. He growled.

"Ain't good enough, midge."

"Um, you are beautiful and glorious and your six-pack could take over the world?"

He stared at me. A few people were whispering and pointing at us, but I was rather distracted because um hi Sawyer was on top of me. I mean, I wasn't exactly an exhibitionist, but… this was freaking hot.

"You got me wet."

"That's what she said, haha-"

He gave a sudden bark of laughter and rolled off of me, lying next to me in the sand, his hands behind his head, staring up at the cloudy sky.

"It's pretty nice out," I said. He nodded, then looked over at me.

"Why the hell are we talking about the weather and not who you met out in th' jungle last night?"

This was said very quietly. I felt my face drain and he didn't look away from me.

"Sawyer, listen-"

"Hey, Sawyer."

We both sat up to see Kate standing over us, her hands on her hips, smirking. I felt a surge of intense relief and one of intense dislike. She glanced at me.

It seemed like we were back to square one.

"We should go get your bandage switched," she said, and Sawyer sighed, climbing to his feet and extending me a hand.

"Yes, freckles, you're probably right." He looked at me and gestured loosely to my chest. "You need t' get that changed, Rambo?"

"Nah. I got some stuff here I should take care off. I'll go bug Jack later."

Sawyer shrugged, walking towards Kate, but not before giving my hand a squeeze.

"See ya, Kat."

"Bye."

He headed off to the jungle with Kate and I walked back to our tent, trying to ignore the intense pangs of jealousy.

I wrote in my diary, wrote a letter that would hopefully print at my house and then, not wanting to stay still, I climbed to my feet, pulled on a pair of Sawyer's shorts _(he's still mine, Kate_), and headed out into the jungle, humming happily to myself. The jungle was calming, more home, in a way, than Tennessee had ever been. It just felt right, here, the danger and the passion and the adrenaline, but there was something else, underneath that. A kind of peace.

I just wandered for a few minutes, not paying much attention to where I was going. I wasn't afraid.

After emerging through a particularly thick clump of trees, I took in the tranquil scene before me and was hit by a hundred thousand memories, each of them like a smack in the face.

The water fall. The lake. This was the first time I'd been here, since…

This was mine and Boone's pond.

I felt myself sit down and just stared at it. It was tranquil, peaceful… and tainted. Tainted by the memory of a man I'd tried and failed to save.

Boone'd been dead eight days, and I was already with another man. Christ, what kind of person did that make me?

"I thought I'd find you here."

I stood up quickly and whirled around to meet Sayid's flat black eyes and my stomach turned to ice. I couldn't think of anything to say and we stood in awkward silence for a few minutes.

"It's been four days," he said finally, his voice quiet and his eyes filled with pain.

"I know," I said quietly, nodding. He took a step closer to me.

"I don't like fighting with you, Katty."

"I don't like it much either, Sayid."

"You were right. About Ana. I believe… I believe she's a good person."

"She is."

"I'm sorry."

I was the one to walk to him, put my hand on his arm. "Our second day here, when we were walking back down after we heard Rousseau's message, d' you remember what you said to me?"

He said nothing. I hugged him, my chin going over his shoulder, his breath warm on my neck. I closed me eyes.

"You're not alone."

Sayid left a few minutes later but I stayed and laid down by the edge of the pond, trailing my hand in the cool, clear water, one hand behind my head, staring up at the wall of green above me. Patches of blue sky filtered through, creating an odd effect with the light.

"I miss you, you know," I said to Boone's memory. "More than I wanna admit to myself. Every time I go to my tent, I kind of half expect to here you, and when it's Sawyer… I love him, Boone. I really do. But there's still hurt when it's him and not you."

I sighed deeply. "Did you feel like that? When you'd roll over in the morning and it'd be me next to you and not Shannon? It sucks, doesn't it?"

It was stupid, how I half expected an answer. I sigh, pursing my lips, tracing patterns over the surface of the water lazily with my finger.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly, my voice low, a few tears in my eyes. "Sorry I couldn't save you. Wish I had. Wish I could've. I love you, Boone."

How long I lay there, staring up at the wall of green above me, I didn't know. The patches of green were turning orange and then…

Nothing.

-

"I don't like this," said Richard as they stared at the snoring girl. Her mouth was open wide, one of her hands trailing in the water. Ben and his companion looked at him. His companion, a thin, steady-handed man in his seventies looked at him and shrugged.

"If you'd give me some of your blood, we wouldn't have to get her's-"

Richard opened his mouth to reply, but Ben cut him off.

"We don't know how long it'll be until she wakes up," he said, fixing his companions in his wide blue stare. "We need to get moving."

His gaze rested on Richard, who met it evenly before nodding. "Fine."

They rose silently to their feet and walked out along the edge of the pond, stopping when they reached the body of the slumbering girl. She looked a little worse for wear, with dark shadows under her eyes and her mouth open wide. Shadows fell harshly across her face, accentuating that scar on the side of her nose. Richard just stared down at her. She looked so… normal. Like a kid, when she was asleep, snoring softly, smacking her mouth every now and then.

Oldham crouched down next to her, drawing a long needle from the pouch around his waist and tapping it a few times. He placed it in the crook of the sleeping girl's elbow and looked up at Richard. For his part, Richard examined Katty's face one last time.

"It's just a sedative, Richard," said Ben. Richard turned to him.

"You wouldn't want someone sedating Alex or Juliet, would you?"

Ben looked away from him after a minute. "No," he said. "No, I wouldn't."

Oldham just shrugged and sent the sedative into Katty's blood stream. The girl slept on with no obvious changes. Ben was looking quite intently at her.

Oldham pulled out another needle, this one attracted to a syringe. He placed it in the crook of her arm and seconds later it began filling with the bright red liquid, filling until Katty's blood went to the top.

"Did you know that DNA has changed very little since the dawn of time?" said Ben quietly as Oldham plucked the syringe of and placed it inside a Styrofoam carrier. Richard didn't respond and he continued, "Oh, a few nuances here and there but, on the whole, our DNA tells the same story that it did thousands of years ago." He looked up at Richard.

"I wonder what story her blood will tell."

Richard just looked at him, half disgusted. Ben met his gaze evenly, then turned on his heel and strode into the jungle with Oldham.

Richard turned to the slumbering Katty and walked over to her, crouching down, reaching out slowly to barely brush her tan cheek with his fingertips. She didn't move. She was barely breathing.

There was something oddly mesmerizing about her. She wasn't beautiful, not like Juliet or her friend Kate or even the blonde Claire. Her features were coarse, thrown together haphazardly in a round face without ever really adjusting to each other.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly to her, knowing she couldn't hear him. "I-"

He cut off, staring down at the ground, his fingertips still on her face. Three thousand years of life, and he couldn't think of what to say to a girl who couldn't hear him anyway.

"I never wanted it to be this way," was what he settled on finally and then, very quickly, he bent down to brush his lips over her forehead, his lips lingering on the taste of her smooth, impossibly young skin.

-

**Day Fifty-Three**

"Katty!"

I sat bolt upright, looking around wildly, my mind foggy and uncertain. My back was sore and I felt altogether odd, and there was a strange stinging in the crook of my arm, and the impression of lips gracing across my forhead. My brow furrowed and then I whipped my head around as someone came crashing through the bushes surrounding the pond- it was Sawyer.

"Hey," I said, and he came to a stop, obviously relieved.

"Where the hell've you been?" he asked, striding over to me. I rose to my feet, confused.

"I've been here since you 'n Kate left for the hatch-"

"Katie, that was yesterday."

There was a second of silence as I stared at him, not fully comprehending what he was telling me.

"What?"

He sighed, looking away from me for a second. "Mike's gone," he said. "Ran off to find his kid, locked Captain clean and el Jacko in the closet. We just got back this morning and you weren't in the tent, so I asked around, and Ana Lucia said she'd last seen you yesterday, then cap'n Falafel told me he'd seen you here."

I was still just staring up at him. Rubbing my arm, which was still stinging slightly. Sawyer's eyes fell downwards and then he grasped my wrist, quite suddenly, and his eyes widened, then narrowed, as they fixed on the crook of my arm.

"What?" I asked him, and he looked up at me, very quickly.

"What is this?" he asked, twisting my arm around. There, in the crook of my arm, was a very small hole, like I'd been poked by a needle, and the area around it was red and swollen. My jaw dropped.

"You been hitting off the rock star's drugs?"

"No! I'd never- I don't- how did this happen?"

I closed my eyes, drowning out Sawyer, thinking. The conclusion was obvious- the Others. Apparently, I wasn't the only one curious about what exactly I was.

"C'mon," growled Sawyer, shaking me out of my reverie. "I'm takin' you to Jack."

-

"Doc!"

Jack was sitting at the bar, his head in his hands, but he looked up sharply as we entered- or, more accurately, as Sawyer dragged me into the room.

"Katty," he said. "What's going on?"

"This," growled Sawyer, shoving my arm out so that the prick and swelling were clearly visible. Still shocked and a little irritated, I jerked my arm away from Sawyer and walked forward to Jack myself.

"I went out in the jungle, just to relax, and I guess I fell asleep. I woke up a few minutes ago and my arm was stinging."

Slipping off of the stool, Jack grasped my arm very gently and held it up to his face. Sawyer was staring between the two of us, his brow furrowed deeply.

"Have you been doing drugs?" asked Jack matter-of-factly. I shook my head.

"No."

'Katty, listen, if you have, you need to let me help you-" he looked up at him with his earnest face, but I shook my head again. "No, Jack, I've never done drugs. Not on the island, not at home, not anywhere."

He stared at me, hard, for just a minute, before nodding.

"You know what this means, doncha, Doc?" asked Sawyer suddenly, his voice quiet. Jack and I both looked around at him and he met Jack's eyes evenly.

"It means they broke their word. They did this to her-"

Jack was shaking his head. Sawyer looked to me. "Y'know I'm right, Kat, I saw it in your eyes."

I said nothing.

"Ain't you gonna back me up?"

"I don't know what happened," I said hesitantly. He sighed.

"Yeah, but you think that's what happened!"

"They haven't given me any reason not to trust them, Sawyer-"

He scoffed incredulously. "They kidnapped you! They kidnapped the kid, Charlie, and Claire-"

"They weren't gonna hurt me-"

"They hung Charlie from a tree," said Jack flatly. "Ethan was going to kill you."

"No," I snapped, whirring on the doctor, "he wasn't."

I looked between the two of them, from Jack's oddly flat gray eyes to Sawyer's angry blue ones. "I know these people, dudes. It might not seem like it now, but they aren't our enemies, and I trust them."

They both just stared at me, Sawyer incredulous and Jack just had a look on his face that made it very clear he thought I was the stupidest creature ever to grace existence, which could very well be true.

"I trust them," I said again, clearly, looking from one man to the other. "And I need to get my bandage changed."

Sawyer left the hatch, still irritated with me. I pulled my shirt off and sat down in front of Jack, sighing. Jack left and returned seconds later with fresh bandages and tape and began to gently peel back the old bandage.

"So," I said slowly, "Michael's gone?"

He froze for a second, then nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, he's gone."

"Ah."

There was an awkward silence, and then I noticed the bottles of medicine sitting on the kitchen counter.

"I thought those were Sawyer's…?"

"They were," he said shortly as he dapped hydrogen peroxide on the healing hole in my chest. I hissed in pain, watching it fizz.

So today was the Long Con. That mean, tomorrow….

Benry.

Heck yes.

-

I was sitting outside my tent when it started raining. People ran into their tents, shrieking and laughing, and I watched Sawyer pull Kate into his tent with a sad smile. It had to happen sometime.

There were different screams, a moment later, and then Sawyer and Kate dashed past me, neither of them so much as glancing at me.

It had to happen sometime.

-

Later that night, I was with Ana Lucia when the guns started going off. We both leapt to our feet out of reflex, her hand going to her hip automatically, but she checked herself when she realized that there was no gun there. I had to laugh at her.

Faces all around her terrified and nervous, their fear highlighted by the oranges and yellows of the fire.

"You gave _him_ the guns?" we heard Jack shout at he rounded on Locke, his voice incredulous and angry. I stared at Sawyer, the gun resting over his shoulder. He saw me and gave an ironic kind of smirk. I just looked at him

"No," replied Locke, his voice quiet and curious, "I hid them."

"That's right, Jack," called Sawyer, tilting his head back with a cocky grin that I loved and right now that pissed me off. "He's as stupid as you are. You were so busy worrying about each other you never even saw me coming, did you?" He stared around at all of us, that smirk on his face. Beside me, Ana shook her head.

"Idiot," she murmured. I said nothing.

"How about you listen up, because I'm only going to say this once." He paused, glaring around at all of us. "You took my stuff. While I was off trying to get us help- get us _rescued_- you found my stash and you took it, divvied it up- my shaving cream, my batteries, even my beer. And then something else happened, you decided these two boys here," he gestured with the gun to Locke and Jack, "were going to tell you what to do and when to do it. Well, I'm done taking orders." His voice dropped to a low, seductive timbre, his Southern accent very strong.

"And I don't want my stuff back. The shaving cream don't matter. Batteries don't matter. The only thing that matters now… are guns. And if you want one you're going to have to come to _me_ to get it!" He looked over at Sayid, who had a very blank look on his face, his arms crossed across his chest. "Oh, you want to torture me, don't you? Show everybody how _civilized_ you are. Go ahead, but I'll die before I give them back. And then you'll really be screwed, won't you?"

The smirk grew wider. "New sheriff in town, boys! Y'all best get used to it."

He came by my tent later that night and sat next to me in the sand. I had my gun in my lap, just playing with it. Stupid, I know.

"How many shots you got left?" he asked.

"Two," I said. He handed me a box of ammo and I glanced at him.

"Just like that?"

"I want you to keep that with you," he said, gesturing to my gun. "All the time. An' keep it loaded."

I just nodded.

"Kat, why didn't you say somethin' bout this?"

"Cause everything happens for a reason, James."

He wrapped and arm loosely around my shoulders.

"Everything?"

I stared out at the waves of the ocean and thought of Boone's smiling face and ice-blue eyes, of Ben's cold features, of Sawyer's intense face, of my family, my friends, dark eyes and islands.

"Everything."

**LOST

* * *

**

"The Minnow and the Trout" by A Fine Frenzy

A/N: I know it's been a while and I'm really sorry. This past week has been absoultely horrible and I've had about three hours of homework a night. Updates will probably pick up a little bit but they won't be very regular and I'm really sorry for that. On the plus side... BENRY FREAKING LINUS. NEXT CHAPTER, BABES. I THINK. MAYBE. HAVE TO SEE HOW IT'S GONNA WORK OUT.

And I am proud to announce that the winnder of the contest from the last chapter is Unidentified Pineapples:) So, girlfriend, send me a message with the basic info about yourself (looks, basic personailty, catchphrases, the essentials, etc) and you will be featured in the backstory of a MAJOR CHARACTER. It's not Katty, don't worry:)

To everyone who's sticking with this story- THANK YOU SO MUCH. It really means a lot to me.

Love you guys,

Sarah


	9. You Know What They Say About Good Things

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking** _**by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**_We were always meant to say goodbye  
Even with our fists held high  
It never would've worked out right  
We were never meant for do or die_

I want you to know that it doesn't matter  
Where we take this road someone's gotta go  
And I want you to know you couldn't have loved me better  
But I want you to move on so I'm already gone

Looking at you makes it harder  
But I know that you'll find another  
That doesn't always make you want to cry

Started with a perfect kiss then we could feel the poison set in  
Perfect couldn't keep this love alive  
You know that I love you so, I love you enough to let you go

**Day Fifty-Four**

The next morning I woke up early and slipped out of Sawyer's sleeping arms, my hands shoved down my pockets, wandering the quiet, mist filled beach while the rest of the camp slept.

Well, most of the rest of the camp.

Ana strode out of the jungle, her arms swinging by her side as she swaggered, a dangerous look in her eyes.

"What's up?" I greeted her, and her dark eyes flashed to me. She took a deep breath.

"There's a woman in the jungle. About your height, long brown hair, smells like she's been out there for a while."

"Rousseau," I said, shaking my head.

"Your buddy Sayid sent me back so he could deal with her-"

My stomach turned over and I stared up at her, jaw dropped.

"What?" she asked, eyeing me like I'd started sporting an afro and a sequined jumpsuit.

"D-did you just say Sayid's with Rousseau?"

"Yeah," she said slowly, as though I was very stupid.

I grinned like a lunatic, punching the air with a whoop of glee and took off through the jungle.

Barefoot.

I never learn my lesson.

However my feet were paid off when I reached the hatch within five minutes. Of course, it was then that I remembered it would be several hours before Sayid came back with Benry.

"Well, damn."

Sighing loudly, wishing that this place had a TV, I fell back onto the couch and drifted back into sleep.

-

Sawyer woke up, and wondered for just a moment why it was so much colder. He blinked a few times before realizing that it was so cold because Katty was gone.

He knew that she'd been having trouble sleeping, but she'd never just left like this. He sat up, looking around the tent, an odd pain in his heart. It was ending. This, whatever this was that they had, was ending. He could see it in her eyes, the pain in her mouth, the turn of her head, hell, he could see it in her absence.

"Shouldn'ta fallen for her, should ya, James?" he murmured to himself before letting his head fall back to his pillow.

-

Sayid froze when he saw Katty, asleep on the couch, her mouth wide open, snoring. He dropped Henry Gale unceremoniously on the floor and then woke up John. When he came back with John in tow Katty was awake, staring at Henry, who was whimpering, like she'd never seen anything quite like him. Henry was glancing at her every now and then.

"Help," he whispered to her, his voice strained with pain. "Help me."

Katty got down on her knees next to him, her mouth open slightly and her eyes wide. Sayid held out a hand to stop Locke and they watched in horrified curiosity as she reached out, very slowly and very cautiously, to the man in orange. Henry regarded her fingertips with the same horrified curiosity that John and Sayid did.

She touched his face, very lightly, and Sayid watched Henry's eyelids flicker.

"You're real," he heard her whisper. "My god, you're real."

Sayid cleared his throat and Katty was immediately on her feet. Sayid said nothing to her as he and Locke approached the man named Henry Gale.

"Minnesota, huh?" said Locke as he looked down on Henry. Katty seemed to have a hard time taking her eyes off of the man in orange, and that worried Sayid. Intensely.

It also made him slightly jealous. He couldn't help but notice the slight blush that spread across her cheeks, the way her mouth opened slightly, the tilting of her head, the calculation in her gaze.

"That's the question, isn't it?" he replied quietly, not taking his eyes off of Henry. Katty's eyes flashed to him.

"Where am I?" moaned Henry.

"Who are you?" asked Sayid calmly.

"Henry, Henry Gale. Ah, my back."

"We're going to take it out, but first I want you to relax." He crouched down next to him. "How did you get to this island?

"Four months ago, we crashed, my wife and I."

Katty still couldn't take her eyes off him. Sayid glanced up and saw her fingers drumming against the seam of her jeans.

"Crashed in what?"

"A balloon," moaned Henry, closing his eyes in pain. "We were trying to cross the Pacific."

"Your wife, " said Sayid calmly, "where is she?"

"She died. She got- she got sick three weeks ago. We were staying in a cave off the beach. Ah, my shoulder. At least untie my arms!"

Sayid and Locke exchanged a look just as Jack walked in, a look of incredulity on his face.

"What the hell's going here?

Katty looked up and Jack's eyes immediately went to her, but her face betrayed nothing.

"Rousseau trapped him in the jungle. She believes he's an Other."

"An other _what_?" interrupted Gale, looking up at them with his brows creased. They ignored him.

"You shot him with an_ arrow_?"

"Do I have a bow?" replied Sayid, the slightest trace of sarcasm in his voice. Katty snorted. Henry's eyes went to her and for just a second, his face flickered and his eyes became icy and calculating and hard, before he became frightened once again.

The mask had only slipped for a second. But that was all Sayid needed.

Jack crouched down next to Henry. "Hey, hey, you with me?" He looked up at Sayid angrily. "What, you were just going to let him bleed to death?"

"I was trying to get honest answers while he was able to give them." Katty made sure not to look at him. "And his wound is far from life threatening."

"We should let Jack treat him first," said Locke for the first time, "then we'll get our answers."

Jack looked to Sayid, then bent over Henry.

"Jack…" said Sayid quietly, "do not untie him."

-

I ran out of the hatch, breathing heavily. As soon as I reached the jungle I simply stood in the green, panting, staring up at the sky.

I'd been looking forward to meeting Ben since I got to the island, but my reaction to him… was _not_ expected. All the dreams, the memories, the reverse déjà vu, the whatever, came rushing back or forward or whatever the hell it was and I'd had a really hard time controlling myself. I leant against a tree, closing my eyes and trying to control the beating of my heart.

"That was insane," I told my self, Ben's bright eyes burned into my mind. My skin felt like it was on fire.

And then, out of nowhere, I saw Sawyer's face in my head and a vice clenched around my heart and tears sprang to my mind.

I'd known this would have to happen since the beginning. It had started with a perfect kiss, but it had to be this way. I had to leave him so that he could move one. Perfect could never keep what we had alive.

_And that was what was so damn tragic, wasn't it_? I thought to myself as I shoved my hands down the pockets of my jeans and began trudging back to the beach, not looking forward to what I'd have to do once I got there.

Sawyer and I were perfect together. We accepted each other, we understood each other, and, most importantly, we loved each other. So why the hell wasn't it enough?

Cause I was an idiot. That's why.

I kicked a tree in frustration, which proved the point that I was, in fact, an idiot.

"Life sucks."

-

When I reached the beach, knowing that I had maybe one more day with Sawyer, I was slightly psychotic. Think angry grizzly bear. Only smaller, and blonde, and then you'd have me.

Sure enough, no sooner had I come out onto the beach than an arm found its' way around my neck and someone- three guesses who- was giving me a noogie and cackling.

I didn't have the heart to end it then. I elbowed him in the stomach and then took of running when he released me with an "oof."

He chased me down the beach, both of us laughing and kicking up sand behind us, before pinning me to the ground with a spectacular flying tackle.

He pinned my wrists over my head and my breath caught in my throat as I looked up at him, his hair falling down, panting and smiling, his eyes dark and happy and loving.

I loved him. I didn't deserve him.

Warmth spread through my abdomen as he leaned down slowly and kissed me softly, his lips warm and sweet and gentle, his hair falling around my face, his hands still wrapped around my wrists, his hips pressing into mine, pinning me into the ground.

He pulled away.

"Good mornin' to you too," I said. He smirked.

"Where you been all day, hobbit?"

I shrugged- an interesting experience with my wrists locked in his grasp.

"In the jungle."

He kissed me again before pulling back.

"That's all I'm gonna get, isn't it?"

-

We spent the day together- our last day- laughing and joking and flirting and kissing. There was an air of finality around it- something bittersweet and tragic. I had to try not to cry.

That night we simply lay in my tent, him shirtless and me in a tank top and a pair of his boxers, lying next to each other as he traced patterns on the skin of my stomach as I tried to work up the nerve to tell him that this had to end- we had to end.

I took a deep breath and rolled onto my stomach.

"Sawyer?"

"Yeah, kid?"

"…"

He levered himself up on his elbows, looking at me expectantly. I had no idea how to say this.

"Sawyer, I-"

He shook his head. "Not tonight."

"What?"

He smiled at me sadly. "Knew it was coming, Kat. I can see it in yer eyes; it's been coming fer a long time. But not tonight. Tonight, let's just pretend we're okay. Let's pretend we're back home and everything's normal and we're safe and we don't have to leave each other so you can do somethin' noble and heroic."

He grasped my face very gently, rubbing my jaw with his thumb. "Lie t' me fer tonight, Kat. Pretend wiv' me. Pretend we're just another normal couple."

I had tears in my eyes but I gave him a quick grin.

"Nine to five jobs?"

"And a fat cat we gotta feed."

"Let's name him Melvin."

He chuckled and then kissed me. "Whatever you want, love."

We collapsed into each other, me lying in his lap and him with his arms around me. I knew he was holding back tears too.

"You can cry," I said, my own voice shaking. "It's okay."

He pulled me up and I looked at him- looked at the tear tracks already on his face.

I'd made Sawyer cry.

And that was when I lost it.

The sobs came uncontrollably, shaking my body, making me gasp even as I gritted my jaw together, tears rolling down my face as Sawyer crushed me to him and held me, rocking me back and forth.

"Life," gasp "freaking" sob "sucks."

He chuckled. "Got that right, darling."

He laid back down on his back with a soft grunt and I pressed my tear soaked cheek to his warm chest, my breathing still uneven.

"Whatever happens," he murmured, his fingers resting on my shoulder as he turned to look at me, "I'm not sorry fer loving you."

-

The night was longer than we day. We didn't sleep and didn't talk that often, just lay in each others arms and cried and kissed, holding each other as close as we could without becoming one person- and it almost felt like we were, sometimes.

Our last night together, and I couldn't even bring myself to tell him I loved him.

**-**

**Day Fifty-Five**

When Sawyer opened his eyes the next morning, she was gone. He could still feel her on his skin, on his lips, he could still smell her presence in the tent- but she was gone. For good, like he'd known she'd be eventually.

He sat up slowly, looking around the tent with an ache in his chest, at the computer, at his clothes and hers, scattered across the tent.

"_It has to be this way_," she'd said, over and over again.

And the pain abruptly turned to anger.

"Fuck that," he snarled, rising to his feet and running out of the tent to find her.

He'd finally found someone who he'd loved as naturally as breathing. She was insane if she though he was gonna let that go without a fight.

**LOST

* * *

**

"Already Gone" by Kelly Clarkson

A/N: Oh the drama. Well, it had to happen sometimes. And what is Sawyer gonna do? Hmmm.... And Benry :) Oh Benry. Things are gonna get VERY INTERESTING.

And that song. My word is it perfect for this or what? The perfect kiss was at the end of the last story and the poison is the knowledge of Kate and Juliet... I mean my gosh it's just perfect!

Love you people. Review!

Sarah


	10. An End

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_** by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**

_You whispered that you were getting tired,  
Got a look in your eye,  
Looks a lot like goodbye.  
Hold on to your secrets tonight.  
Don't want to know I'm okay with this silence  
It's truth that I don't want to hear_

You're hiding regret in your smile  
There's a storm in your eyes I've seen coming for awhile  
Hold on to the past tense tonight  
Don't say a word,  
I'm ok with the quiet.  
The truth is gonna change everything.

So lie to me and tell me that it's gonna be alright  
So lie to me and tell me that we'll make it through the night  
I don't mind if you wait before you tear me apart,  
Look me in the eye,  
And lie, lie, lie.

**Chapter Ten: An End**

After scouring the beach for the diminutive blonde, Sawyer had to stop and actually think about where the infuriating girl could possibly be.

He'd missed the main point in the whole scenario- that Katty, who, when desiring to be left alone, was nigh impossible to find, did not, at this point in time, _want_ to be found. However, he, James, didn't much care about that at the moment. He wasn't going to let her go that easily.

He scanned the edge of the forest, thinking hard. She'd been spending a lot of time with Ana Lucia; it made sense that the Mexican would know where to find her.

Tramping through the jungle angrily, he approached the woman's tent and prodded her with his foot.

"Hey, Ana. Wake up."

She grunted and rolled over in her sleep, her tank top riding up to reveal a patch of smooth, brown skin. She opened her eyes and glared up at him.

"The hell do you want?" she asked and he crouched down next to her.

"Katty," he said, his voice coming out harder than he'd intended it to, although he didn't really care at the moment. "You seen her?"

"Not lately," she shot back, the same sarcasm in her slow voice as her eyes narrowed.

"You sure about that?"

"Positive. Why? She get away from you?"

He glared at her. "You don't know what yer talkin' bout."

She just raised an eyebrow. He sighed and sat down next to her, running a hand through his shaggy hair, and she just looked at him, unimpressed.

"I don't know how to hold onto her," he said gruffly, looking anywhere but at the Mexican with dark eyes. "I ain't never loved anyone, and now she says she's gotta go for some noble, bullshit reason?" He looked at Ana for the first time and scoffed at himself, rolling his eyes and looking away just as quickly.

"And why the hell am I talking about this to you?"

"My helpful and caring personality," she said flatly, and he looked at her in surprise before laughing.

"Good one, Lucy," he said sarcastically.

She sat up and leaned forward, exhaling, giving Sawyer a wonderful view down her bra.

"Listen, cowboy, if you wanna get something, go for it. But you gotta realize… what you do today, right now, cause you_ think_ you're in love, could have repercussions for way more than just you and her."

He glanced up and met her black eyes, thinking about Katty, thinking about Kate, and then there was something else, like the wisp of déjà vu, wheat- blonde hair glittering in the sun and bright blue eyes and a tired smirk.

-

She was sitting on the jungle floor, leaning against a tree, one leg pulled up to her chest and the other outstretched. She was barefoot, again, and her eyes and the areas around them were red, as was her nose.

Sawyer just looked at her for a minute, thinking she looked slightly like a blonde Rudolph, before storming out to talk to her, yell at her, kiss her, or maybe to do all of the above. She glanced over at him and immediately jumped to her feet, brushing dirt off her backside. Sawyer strode over to her and grabbed her arms and slammed his lips on hers, kissing her forcefully.

It lasted for about five seconds before they parted, flushing, the tears in Katty's eyes welling up again.

"I ain't lettin' you go," he murmured, and she stared at him before wrenching away.

"You do realize," she said, her voice hard despite the shudder that ran through it, "that this helps nothing?"

"I love you, goddammit!" He growled through gritted teeth, making a violent movement with his hand.

She paled, her mouth opening slightly, and he closed the distance between them in a step.

"What could be so damn important that could stop that?"

"You have no idea. God, I knew this wouldn't work!"

"Then why did you let me love you?" he growled. She gave an insane laugh, tossing her hands up in the air.

"Cause I thought we could take it! Cause I thought… I thought that I'd just be able t' leave when I had to."

"You thought wrong, Kat," he said softly. She fixed him in that bright blue gaze, her golden-brown hair falling around her face, her lips set in a firm line.

"Don't you get it, James? It doesn't matter, what we do or what we feel…the things that you're gonna do, you're gonna do regardless of whether you love me or not! It doesn't matter-"

"It doesn't matter what I want, is that it?" he hissed, cocking his head to the side.

"No-!"

"Oh, yeah? Cause it sure as hell sounds like it, Kathryn-"

"You are going to make the decisions I've already seen you make," she said quietly, her eyes filling up with an ancient pain, "whether I'm here or not. Don't you see? I'm doing this to save us more hurt later!"

"More hurt," he growled, his eyebrows pulling up in the middle. "Katie, I don't see how that's possible."

She just looked at him, a sad grin on her face. "Believe me. It's possible."

He stared at her, wondering what the hell had to happen to make her do this (and make him, in the back of his mind, realize that, as much as he hated her for it, she was right) and she stared back, tears in her eyes, her face red. "All this- everything- that first kiss in the jungle-"

She shook her messy head. "We never had a chance, James. We were always meant to say goodbye."

"It was _perfect_, kid. Everything we have- ev'rythin' we coulda had, doncha get it?"

He grabbed the tops of her arms again, forcing her to meet his eyes. "Neither of us'll ever get that again if we leave each other now."

"You know what they say about good things," she said, as she reached up to gently grasp his wrists. "C'mon, James, you 'n me… we've never been the type to do or die. We're survivors, right? We keep on going."

He just stared at her before letting his hands slide off of her arms.

"You doin' this cause you feel like you have to, or cause you just wanna move onta someone else?"

She stared at him like he'd hit her.

"What the heck are you talking about?"

"Boone's not even been gone two weeks 'n since then you've already had and gotten ridda me. What kinda person does that make ya, kid?"

He was grasping at straws now, trying to hurt her. He didn't mean it, and he knew she had to know that. It was how he coped.

He hadn't expected her reaction. Her face crumpled completely like he had hit her and she began sobbing almost hysterically, her body shaking. Sawyer stared at her, stricken. She turned on her heel and strode away from him, her arms wrapped around herself.

"Katty-"

"Who's fucking idea was it that we get together, James?" she shouted, whirling around on him, tears streaming down her face. "I didn't ask for this, alright? I don't wanna be the fucking guardian anymore!"

With that she turned back to the jungle and disappeared in the green depths, leaving James standing with his feet rooted to the ground, listening to the receding sobs of the only person he'd ever really loved.

-

Sawyer passed by Ana's tent and she looked up at him, ice in her gaze.

"Well done," she said, her voice hard.

He just looked at her. "Not in the mood, Rambita-"

"I don't give a fuck about your mood," she snarled quietly, rising to her feet. "I do care about why I can hear one of the toughest women I know crying like she just got her heart ripped out."

He was silent for a moment and didn't meet her eyes. "You heard that?"

"The whole _camp_ heard, Ford. Why is she crying?"

He looked up at her. "Cause she just got her heart ripped out."

He turned and saw Jack, staring at him. Sawyer said nothing.

-

_My fault, my fault, idiot._

She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, rocking back and forth and sobbing.

"Help me," she sobbed to no one. "Help me."

And what hurt the most was that she knew he was right.

-

I approached the hatch a few hours later, under control, although my eyes and nose were still rather red.

Sniffling, I entered the gloom of the hatch and made my way to the main room, where I had every intention of collapsing onto the couch and sleeping. However, to my chagrin, there was already someone asleep on it.

Sayid was breathing deeply, one arm thrown across his stomach, his head tilted back and his hair falling over the arm of the couch, the shadows under his eyes dark. It was adorable.

I smiled softly and sadly and turned to make my way to the bunk beds- when I saw the door to the armory.

And remembered about Benjamin Linus.

Internally, I warred with myself for a moment. What was more important; Ben or sleep?

Sleep, I decided, was the more logical course of action, as it was unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely) that I could get seriously injured whilst sleeping. However, no sooner had I collapsed under the covers, nestling into the pillow, exhausted from sobbing, did I really fully realize- Benjamin Linus was merely twenty feet away from me.

My eyes snapped open. I stared up at the bunk on top of me, swore vigorously, then threw the sheets off me and swung my legs off of the bunk before striding over to the armory.

And then I remembered that I didn't have the combination.

"…. Damn!"

"Katty?"

I whirled around to see Jack, who was staring at me like he was worried about me. I gave him a very quick grin, trying to look like I wasn't doing anything that wouldn't piss him off. The grin felt forced and fake and my heart hurt and everytime I blinked I saw Sawyer's face in my mind.

"Wassup?"

"What are you doing?"

"I was gonna talk to this dude," I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder at the door, "when I remembered I didn't know the combination. But now that you're here, that's not really a problem, so-"

"No."

"What?"

"No," he said, more firmly, raising his eyebrows. "I don't want you anywhere near him."

My heart fell. "But… why?"

He just stared at me and when he spoke it was as though to someone who was very stupid. "Because he might be _dangerous_, Katty."

"Dude, I can take care of myself."

"No," he said, more firmly, raising his eyebrows. "And that's final."

There was a ring in his last word that told me, quite clearly, I'd be an enormous fool to pursue the issue further. So I bit my tongue to stop the uprising of teenage "don't tell me what I can't do" (as opposed to the Locke "don't tell me what I can't do") and went back to the bunk bed.

-

It was the middle of the night when I emerged from the hatch, holding a torch in one hand, headed back to the beach. If Jack knew that I was walking through the jungle, alone, in the middle of the night… well, he'd probably have a heart attack. Which was precisely why I hadn't told him.

The torchlight made everything seemed eerier, somehow. I was jumping at shadows, at whispers, and small noises in the dark.

I suddenly wished, very desperately, that I wasn't alone. It was a kind of dreadful, familiar presence at my back, a weight in my chest that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

My body turned colder with fear and I began walking very quickly, my heart pounding, determined to not look behind me.

Once I finally reached the beach I was half panting, my heart beating so quickly I was sure it would pound right out of my chest.

And Sawyer wouldn't be in my tent, warm and asleep and comforting.

Tears filled my eyes and I fought the urge to kick myself as I sucked it up and made the way over to the tent I'd shared with two very different men.

Who I'd been expecting to see when I pulled back the flap, I wasn't sure- Boone or Sawyer or maybe Sayid- but I definitely had not been expecting this.

"Richard?"

**LOST

* * *

**

"Lie" by David Cook.

A/N: Another short chapter. The action's gonna start picking up pretty soon and there's only about fourteen days left in this season! This are about to start getting pretty interesting, guys.

Bye! Please review!

Sarah.


	11. The Island Bicycle

_**That's Why My Hand Was Shaking**_ **by Teenage Anomaly

* * *

**

_The world was on fire _  
_No one could save me but you. _  
_Strange what desire will make foolish people do _  
_I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you _  
_And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you _

_No, I don't want to fall in love _  
_This love is only gonna break your heart _  
_No, I don't want to fall in love_

**Chapter Eleven: The Island Bicycle**

The immortal had his hands behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles, lounging out across my bed like he owned the thing. I just stared at him, at a loss for words. He looked up at me.

"Hello," he said, his voice as nonchalant as his demeanor. I was completely speechless.

"… hi."

I sat down with my legs crossed next to him, trying not to stare. He seemed completely at ease.

"Dude, not to be rude or anything, but what are you doing here?"

"I need to talk to you," he said easily, looking up at me. "This seemed a fairly easy way to get your attention."

"Believe me, you've got it."

"The jungle isn't safe," he said flatly, sitting up and looking me in the eye. "Especially not at night. Even for you."

I said nothing of the feeling I'd had just moments before.

"Those of us who know about you," he continued, looking at me very intently, "would not harm you because we thought you would tell our secrets. However, there are those who are very interested to find out what, exactly, you are."

This made me think of the prick in my arm and I opened my mouth to speak but he shook his head, cutting me off.

"No, let me finish. And those of us who have no idea who you are wouldn't hesitate to kill you. I know you feel at home in the jungle, safe, even, but you can't be alone in it, not as far away from the beach as you've been going, do you understand?"

I nodded and he sighed, gesturing at my arm, his eyes resting on the crook of my elbow.

"And I guess you have a few questions about that."

"A few, yeah."

He chuckled, eyes flashing back up to mine. "I mentioned that some of us are very curious to find out exactly what you are."

"So what, you took my blood?"

"You can be uncannily perceptive."

"Guess that makes two of us."

He was sitting way too close and when he looked at me like that, it felt like there was fire running through my veins instead of blood.

"As I said," he continued, turning to look at me. "Some of us are very, very interested in you."

A dirty grin spread over my face. "You one of 'em?"

He just looked at me for a second before laughing, just once. "You are a piece of work."

"It's a talent. Back to taking my blood…"

He was still looking at me, his ancient eyes guarded. "We gave you a sedative first then took some to do tests on."

"And? What did you find out?"

He just raised an eyebrow. "You really expect me to tell you?"

"No, but I figured it was worth a shot."

He chuckled and rose slowly to his feet. I mimicked him.

"Why did you come here, Richard?"

When I looked in to his eyes, it was almost like I could see time passing, see the rise and falling of ancient civilizations. Then he opened his mouth and the illusion was gone.

"I came to tell you to be careful. That's all."

He was lying.

I was lying on my back with my hands behind my head, staring at the wall of my tent, trying not to think about Boone or Richard or Sawyer when the latter stormed in.

I craned my neck up to see the angry conman then let my head fall back down with a loud sigh.

"What're ya doin' here, Sawyer?"

"_Why_?" he asked, throwing his hands up slightly, cocking his head angrily as he stared at me. "If you knew this was gonna happen eventually, an' ya _did_, Kat, then why did you do it in th' first place?"

I began banging my head slightly against the sand. " 'Cause I thought we could handle it. Sweetie, ya had to know this was gonna happen-"

He crouched down next to me and pulled me up by my shoulders. "How the hell was I supposed t' know, Katty?" he asked through gritted teeth, his brows pulled up. "All I know is that the past few weeks with you… they've been the happiest goddamn weeks of my life."

Heart, meet break.

"James…"

"Goddammit, Kat," he growled through gritted teeth. "Don't call me James," he punctuated this by shaking my shoulders, " 'cause you only do that when you're tryin' t' make a point."

"Well, listen to me, then. I made a mistake. I misjudged how much I cared about you and how much you cared about me-"

"-_damn_ right, you did-"

"-but it doesn't matter."

I was the one gripping his shoulders now, my eyes burning into his, a nauseated feeling in my stomach at the thought of loosing him. He looked back at me, that furrow between his dark brows, his blue eyes filled with anger, bitterness and a little bit of hurt.

"It doesn't matter, Sawyer. One of us is gonna be leaving anyway, and there are things that have to happen that can't happen if we're together-"

"-like me and Kate?"

I stared at him, mouth open slightly, and he scoffed. "C'mon, _Kathryn_. I ain't _stupid_."

"Among other things," I said with a noncommittal nod of my head. His mouth opened slightly in incredulity.

"You're actually doin' this so I can get with another woman? Jeez, kid, you are somethin' else."

"You don't understand. Things have to happen that won't if we are together. I love you, James, and believe me, I mean that with every single part of me, but this is what has to happen."

He just looked at me for a long time, and then his grip on my arms relaxed, and he reached up, very softly, to touch my face with his hand. I closed my eyes and leaned into his face, reaching up and grabbing his other hand and holding it as tight as he could.

"I love you," he murmured. "An' that's the truth, and kid, I ain't never said it an' meant it before. You're half my age, an' we've only known each other for two months, but I love you, dammit. Don't do this."

"I've known you a lot longer than two months," I said, opening my eyes and looking up at him. "But I never thought I'd fall in love with you. Not really."

He smiled, a sad smile that twisted my heart and tore at my soul. "I knew I would. Ever since that first night, on the beach."

I pulled him to me and held him, his hands on my back on his face in my neck.

"It'll be okay," I said. "You'll be okay."

He scoffed into my neck. "I know I'll be okay, Kat."

He pulled back, his eyes searching mine. "But with you, I was more than okay. An' I never wanna go back to okay again."

I thought of Juliet, of her bright eyes and her smirk and her wide smile that she wouldn't show enough until she would meet this man in front of me.

"Believe me, Sawyer, you'll be more than okay again."

It was one of the hardest goodbyes I'd ever been apart of, and we both knew that it was for real this time. We held each other, kissed each other, and then he walked out, turning to give me that sad smirk before the flap of the tent fell shut behind him, leaving me alone in the darkness with my memories and the scents of three different men.

"Christ, I'm the island bicycle."

* * *

"Wicked Game" by Heather Nova

A/N: Hi, guys! It's been forever, and I really don't have an excuse. My year has been crazy and busy and I haven't had the time for anything extra, so writing fell by the wayside. I also have some bad news regarding this series; I'm not as interested or inspired as I was. It kind of just fizzled out, and I'm sorry for that, cause I've always gotten so annoyed when the authors of stories I loved said that, but it's true. Thing is, I knew where I wanted this to go, in every season, the end and all, so I was wondering if maybe you wanted me to post something explaining everything and tying up all the loose ends, because I know it's frustrating. Thank you for sticking with this story and I'm so, so sorry to let you guys down.

PIMP TIME. If you like this story, and the OC, here's the kicker- she's based on a real person, an author on this site. I have written some other stories about this girl (Transformers) if you'd like to check those out. Also, she has a story she's working on now, an OC story set in _Supernatural. _If you're in to either of those, I'd definitely recomend checking out my stories and hers. And let me know if you want me to let you guys know what happens in the rest of the story- I'll probably do a new story and do a chapter per season and I'll make it good, cause I really do feel like I owe you guys.

Love (and I'm sorry!)

Sarah.


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